I get the point of the blog author and I partly agree with it; but there are different types of "hard" and "easy".
To produce much of value at the low-end you need a really comprehensive understanding of the technology at the level you are working at which has significant upfront learning (and likely just plain aptitude) costs that aren't really addressed too much here. Once you have that knowledge, then yes, you get far less surprises, but acquiring it in the first place is not at all trivial or "easy" (though it may seem like it if you're a geek that's been banging away with assembler for years... you've just forgotten how much effort you expended at that stage, probably because it felt fun to learn).
At the higher-end you can string together a bunch of frameworks and glue code you cut and pasted off Stack Overflow and get something that pretty much does what you want, most of the time, maybe, while barely understanding the underlying technology.
Which is "easier" or "harder" depends a lot on what you mean by those terms.
Also the assumption that "high-level" means HTML/CSS/JavaScript is not that useful for the overall debate since not all high-level development is as annoyingly unpredictable as HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
To produce much of value at the low-end you need a really comprehensive understanding of the technology at the level you are working at which has significant upfront learning (and likely just plain aptitude) costs that aren't really addressed too much here. Once you have that knowledge, then yes, you get far less surprises, but acquiring it in the first place is not at all trivial or "easy" (though it may seem like it if you're a geek that's been banging away with assembler for years... you've just forgotten how much effort you expended at that stage, probably because it felt fun to learn).
At the higher-end you can string together a bunch of frameworks and glue code you cut and pasted off Stack Overflow and get something that pretty much does what you want, most of the time, maybe, while barely understanding the underlying technology.
Which is "easier" or "harder" depends a lot on what you mean by those terms.
Also the assumption that "high-level" means HTML/CSS/JavaScript is not that useful for the overall debate since not all high-level development is as annoyingly unpredictable as HTML/CSS/JavaScript.