I honestly think "ipsec is too complex" is overdone. Yes, you need to know your networking basics and understand routing but that's probably a good thing when setting up a VPN. Then you pick your crypto primitives from e.g. https://www.keylength.com/en/compare/ and you are basically done.

But no, it's the typical groupthink of 'old is bad' so instead of reading two pages of documentation and having native support across all major platforms people would rather re-invent the wheel.