I've never used their toolchain, I use Rust on the RP2040 and it's a breeze to set up.

But yeah there's also CircuitPython where you literally drag and drop a firmware blob onto the volume that shows up when plugging in an RP2040 board, and then you're just editing a Python-esque script to do stuff. Not sure what could be easier when it comes to starting with embedded stuff. You can even use the Arduino IDE with RP2040 boards if you like.

https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-raspberry-pi...