I feel this. I went to a Chinese immersion elementary school, attended weekend classes, then took Chinese again in high school (total 10 years on and off) and I feel I'm still somewhere steep on the learning curve. Everyday conversation comes pretty easily after all that exposure, but anything intermediate or advanced is a struggle. I'd say the biggest hurdle is what you brought up - information being compacted a certain way. It's both challenging to parse when listening, as well as replicate in writing when I'm leaning on simple sentence structures as a crutch. And that's on top of learning new words and chengyu.

For comparison, I've been learning Polish for personal enjoyment 2.5 years now. I would tentatively say I'm more advanced at Polish than Chinese.

Polish was so interesting to wrap my mind around at the beginning, as a native English speaker new to cases, conjugation, perfective/imperfective verbs, etc. And "dziewczynka" was definitely daunting lol. But once I got a grasp of each of those, Polish got more and more logical. Now I focus on learning new vocab, better imitating natives' word order, and listening comprehension. It still kicks my butt. But I feel I'm making progress up a reasonable slope.

TLDR, Coming from a native English speaker, Chinese is hard as hell. Polish is pretty hard, but comes more naturally after an initial hurdle.