I remember some documentary with Jack White talking about how he tries to make music composition more difficult on purpose. I had a very similar reaction to yours--the example they played under his voice over wasn't very impressive to me and I'm not much of a Jack White fan to begin with.

Now that I'm writing this, I suppose one useful concept is that of constraints promoting creativity by forcing you to come at the blank canvas from a different mindset than you're used to.

I suppose there are some times to struggle and grow but other times, like a competitive swimmer shedding his 'drags', to engage our full unhindered capacity free of such artificial handicaps.

Another musical example for me is the band Amaranthe. They usually make extensive use of modern production techniques but their talent is also very evident when they're unplugged:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/J4Jhpx2Qmz4?start=61&end=290

Music video for the same song: https://youtu.be/D8lV1To-_fU

Regarding the “making composition difficult on purpose” I suggest the book “Trust the process: an artist’s guide to letting go” (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1570623570) which has lots of interesting material on how to stimulate creativity, and explicit advice about how to use the limitations you have as stepping stones to move forward instead of like constraints that impede your progress.

Really not the same thing. You could produce the same C++ program in Notepad that you could in any other editor or IDE. Here the artist is working with restricted tools in a way that the restriction becomes part of the work itself

Not really, there are a few people in the world that CAN create an image pixel by pixel using MS paint and make it look like a photo (the top people on hyper-realism) and get the very same result they would get using Photoshop, just taking tons of more time.

And even if the "restricted tools" do make a difference we are splitting hairs here, because we can create a similar equivalence, e.g. a c++ program with artificial restrictions: A program where you can't use your own classes or structs, or a program that can't be bigger than 1KB, and so on.

As an intern in a Google training program in Brazil, they gave us the project to make a crawler, without any c++ libs other than curl.

It was difficult, but we really learned a lot.

I think you fail to appreciate that learning a new skill requires some kind of connection to an already learned skill, and that this connection becomes harder to establish at old age.

The old lady's choice may have made perfect sense from her point of view.

Pretty sure whatever she knew already (e.g. oil painting) at least had anti-aliasing; what I mean is that there are tools that are even simpler than MS-paint but produce better results ("better" as in art more likely to be liked by more people)

I think I learned the ins and outs of coding a lot better by doing it by hand. Perhaps it helps reinforce and understand what you're doing. But, I see it being the same as being forced to do your math exams without a calculator in school: almost no one works that way, but if you can work that way, then when you use the calculator you become much more effective. It's more of a learning or training exercise so that when you are doing other things, you have a foundation to build on.

Creativity = Originality / Tools used