I wouldn't say it is easier (or harder), I would say it is different. Before you were having to remember lots of tricks to fit as much information into as little memory as possible. Today we have lots more stuff to remember. Operating systems are way more complex.

At the end of the day, most people are programming at a far higher level, so things are more productive. I have produced a reasonably sophisticated databases / web front end for my work, in Django as a one man team. Ten years ago I believe that it would have taken far more man hours to achieve the same thing. I don't have to remember tricks to compress data, as disk space is cheap now. I do have to know reasonably advanced SQL, and remember a lot about how Django works.