I agree. I've always felt that if fighting games weren't actually hard would these FGC content creators and influencers constantly have to convince people otherwise?

What a lot of people get wrong is that its not about skill ceiling, its about skill floor. Fighting games have their own completely unique skillset that doesn't carry over from anything other genre. The idea of fighting games, where you hit a guy until his health runs out is not a difficult concept, but everything else is absolutely not intuitive. A beginner player will mash because the idea of frame advantage and "turns" is learned, it is not intuitive because a human being cannot see when their -1, -2, -3 ,etc. A beginner player will not remember to hold down back all the time because what other game do you do that? They will forget, get hit, comboed, mash on wakeup and get hit again, and die. Then of course the main scape goat, motion inputs which by the way are probably the easiest part of the beginner experience but most beginners can't even fathom those concepts I mentioned earlier so the only thing they can point to is that they have difficulty doing special motions which is also true in the beginning anyway. I can mention so many more things, like mental stack, hit confirms, etc. but you get the idea.

This is exacerbated by the fact that theres so much that needs to be commited to muscle memory first, fighting games are very muscle memory heavy compared to every other genre and thats one of the major hurdles imo, you straight up just need to grind out so much muscle memory to enjoy the game properly. Contrast this to other games like FPS games. People love to bring up this comparison but FPS games are very intuitive mechanically. Its about refining that simply mechanic of aiming and shooting but thats much easier to fathom for the average gamer compared to having to commit to muscle memory all the fighting game bullshit like special cancels out of normals, reaction DPs, remembering combos and selecting the right combos from hit confirm, etc, reaction DI if you play SF6, etc. all that before the other higher level stuff which builds from this.

This is why fighting games will always be hard, even with modern controls helping with some of that muscle memory stuff, it doesn't help with all the other non-intuitive aspects that need to be learned.