So often I have told management that "I can write a web scraper in 30 minutes" but they don't believe it because the UI application that they thought would take 3 days took 30 days instead. If I write the scraper anyway I often get it done in 15 minutes, changing the URL matching rules is almost always easier than figuring out how to authenticate to an API and evades the rate limits.
For years there was the stereotype of the high school hacker because: hacking doesn't take a lot of experience and skill, like there was that time we found you could dial 622-0622 and a modem answered and we tried to log in as "uucp" because that was recommended in the Bell System Technical Journal and no password and being stupid kids we filled the disk with a script we copied out of Byte magazine.
Now building things, or running a system where the uucp password isn't the empty string... that's hard!