It's still like that. Ok, you aren't going to know all of the advanced graphics techniques, but you can render a scene with multiple cubes and a first-person camera in 100 lines of code.
Rendering a triangle to the screen is easy; it takes understanding the unique way these tools work, but at the end of the day it's not complicated stuff.
This is just from fiddling around in my free time and reading a lot of tutorials, but here's a WebGL renderer that will render a 40x40x40 block of semi-randomized cubes. You can clone that and open index.html in a browser. WASD work about as you expect and spacebar locks the mouse.
OpenGL works pretty much the same in very language and so much legwork ends up through matrix math. Once that starts to click that's the heart of a lot of graphics tech, even if it's not state of the art.
Rendering a triangle to the screen is easy; it takes understanding the unique way these tools work, but at the end of the day it's not complicated stuff.