That the nice thing about Japanese. It's pretty easy to guess the meaning of a word by only knowing the kanji. For example, the word 配信, meaning "stream" or "broadcast", is made up of the kanji that generally indicate "distribution" and "signal". Conversely, English doesn't have as much of that benefit for unknown words.

After enough time, I don't think picking up Japanese was "hard" per say, just very time-consuming. The thing with languages is that a lot of text written in modern times was not written with the intent of being difficult to understand; there are just a lot of words to choose from to get a specific point across, so you have to learn them all. Even texts that contain a lot of uncommonly used terminology boil down to learning the words you haven't ever encountered in 5 years of practice.

The main roadblock I encountered learning Japanese was not knowing the characters and common grammatical patterns to anchor yourself with that are second nature to people that know the language. With enough practice, there are plenty of times that I'm not even conscious of the effort it took to understand a different language when consuming foreign media. It's a weird feeling when you stop taking it for granted for a moment.