In web programming it's especially complex imo. Take a new programmer that can program basic stuff. He wants to learn server side programming and suddenly needs to setup a bunch of servers(vm, vagrant or docker) , needs to learn git, needs to learn how a framework works because you don't want to teach spaghetti code. Then there's html5, Css and probably some template language and a lot of js in modern apps. Add less, sass, coffeescript testing, rest, a js framework and websockets and you have a totally overwhelming setup which is the standard for most apps today.
You don't generally need to "setup a bunch of servers" when you're first learning web programming, and a "new programmer that can program basic stuff" can hopefully already use git - counting that as part of "web programming" as distinct from other programming is hugely disingenuous (git was created for programming that was not web programming). What's left isn't trivial, to be sure, but I don't know that it's harder than getting set up to do development on a microcontroller. More languages are involved, but languages are rarely the hard part.
