Why is PC gaming still considered difficult with too much tinkering?
Because it's exactly that? I need to troubleshoot hardware issues at least once a year and troubleshoot Windows or driver issues significantly more frequently. And not because anything in my rig is cheap or low end. Even I get tired of dealing with all the little and not so little technical issues that come along with gaming on PC, and I've been building and fixing computers for fifteen years. On a console, you never have to worry about your controller disappearing because of bugs in DS4Windows, you're not looking up fixes from PCGamingWiki because that game that just came out that doesn't work, you're not forced to carefully tweak settings for each new game to get it running well. Even having high end hardware doesn't exempt you from that, if anything it makes it worse because if you bought a $650 graphics card, you're going to want to squeeze every bit of fidelity out of it that you can.
That's without even touching on the hardware costs, which are ungodly. You can buy Crysis 3 for the Xbox 360 (it's even a remarkably intact port), I guarantee that you can not run Crysis 3 on a midrange gaming PC from 2005. The notion that you can get a comfortable system at anywhere near console prices and have it last through a console life cycle is false. It is a straight up lie. You might be able to dig up something with used parts, but then you're dealing with no warranty and the overwhelming majority of people don't have time for that. Even if your parts are new, you're still stuck with all the troubleshooting to figure out which part is the problem before sending in an RMA; and that process does not always give straightforward, clear answers.
A current game might list a GTX 660 (PS4 GPU equivalent) as the minimum, but that's generally going to be for 720p30, not the 1080p30 or 900p30 of the console release. Spec creep is alive and well, each new year's releases will be more demanding than the last, no exceptions. And that's without even getting into bad ports. Except when half of the new AAA games coming out perform badly, it's not really a few bad apples so much as that the entire thing being rotten. With the PS4 Pro offering great visuals at higher than 1080p resolutions for all of $400, the only reason to get in on PC is if you can't live without mouse controls. Unfortunately I am one of those people. My attempts to play any shooter on a console are laughable. The indies are nice too, but most of the great ones come out on console eventually. Even if you miss out on a few that are exclusive, we're not exactly suffering a shortage of new games right now.
I'm sitting here on a $3000 gaming PC which I would never want to live without, so please believe me when I say: PC gaming is a terrible hobby and most of its merits are dubious or overstated. Please don't get into it.