Yes, writing code that (appears to) work was not the hard part. Even before LLMs you could find very cheap contractors on Upwork or through offshoring companies to write "code".

Well-engineered code is hard. It still is. Code that is reliable, extensible, maintainable, scalable, legible, understandable is hard. Code where the specs and the "why" behind it were pressure-tested via thought and good intuition.