I don’t believe this to be the case. The root cause is that company exposed the product’s internal workings to developers via APIs 20 years ago. Tons of companies built their whole business on it, and those APIs will never be deprecated. Most of those companies don’t employ any software engineers, so migrating isn’t viable. I’ve been in the room when complicated new APIs are developed, and we definitely weren’t making things hard on purpose. Every new feature needs to work with whatever our customers built out of what came before. We did our best given the constraints.

Of course these opinions are my own, I don’t currently work at Salesforce, and I can only tell a tiny part of the story from my own perspective, and it’s probably unfair to people who did a lot of good work.