I've had the same experience (over decades) and never understood it. SQL should not be difficult for any professional programmer, and it's extremely powerful.

> All because highly paid programmers are scared of RDBs.

Really? That's not my experience over the last thirty years of programming. As soon as relational databases became something that everyone could use we all jumped in And not just programmers either, a lot of people who never wrote a line of code in their lives became adept at writing SQL in order to get around limitations in ERP systems for instance.

Is this problem something that afflicts only younger programmers?

All those strong relations will be lost, like tears in the rain.