If we're talking about game development from the 10 last years, it's not hard. It's long, tiring, sometimes boring. But most of the coding is already solved, done and reinvented maybe 50 times already. It's not hard as in "I need to think deep into solving this issue none ever solved".
I'm not sure time or money inherently equal difficulty. There's plenty of things that take a long time to build and/or are expensive to build, but are still easy to build.
Sorry, but no. This is not true. It definitely was hard. So hard that few people actually made games. I remember using GAS (Unreal Engine) and being baffled by the complexity of the framework. And then when I didn't use GAS, I was baffled by the complexity of what it handled. It's hard.