Have you talked to Gen Z about this? In so many countries now, young people are growing up with hours a day spent on English-language social media, and they absorb it by osmosis. These young people don't have the same perception of English being "hard" or not "neutral" as older generations.

A lot of 1990s or early-millennium advocacy for language diversity and non-English interlinguistics doesn't resonate with many young people today. In fact, avoiding English (like antiglobalization ideas more generally) has become associated with the far-right in some countries.

Well, any language becomes relatively easy when you learn by immersion. That’s how I finally managed to learn English with little effort, after struggling with it for years. Doesn’t mean the language in and of itself is easy. And it most certainly isn’t neutral; just the fact that it’s the native language of several countries and an inherent vehicle of cultural influence disqualifies it as such.

I’m not in any way doubting the success of English as a widespread second language, I just find it unfortunate we haven’t gone with an easy, neutral language instead.

It has already been adopted for international communication. Quite an easy and forgiving language, probably because of the above. English it's historically a mix of different language families.

I wouldn’t call English especially easy and forgiving. Why would you?

You have a certain liberty in English with how you can arrange your sentences, which you haven't in most other languages, in my experience.

There are no hard-to-learn parts in English such as genuses (Germanic) or complicated verbs (Latin). And the word "did" does a lot of heavy lifting to make it easier.

The great problem with English is that the spoken language has nothing to do with the written language, so you can never know from reading how a word should be pronounced, and vice versa.

I don’t feel like the sentence structure in English is particularly flexible. It relies on word order for things other languages prefer to express with cases, prepositions, or context.

I think the disparity between the written and spoken language is big enough of a problem to make the language difficult; certainly not less so than extra verb forms or gender in other languages. For example, I don’t find French remarkably more difficult than English, because even though it has both of those features, reading it is fairly straightforward, which makes the language so much more comfortable.

Another part of English that I personally always found challenging (and which still trips me up from time to time) are the verb tenses. Just wrapping my head around them and all the context switching to know which one to use for the past/present/future relative to what I’m talking about right now. Perhaps most people don’t feel as strongly about them, though.

All that said, I consider English among the easier languages to learn, but still quite challenging. Difficulty-wise, one can do far, far better.

Most native English speakers cannot understand most non-native speakers.