Very easy if it was an earlier model, although I’ve seen some of the newer modchips make soldering about as simplified as possible (but still kinda hard, it’s a tiny board to be fiddling with). I literally hacked my current switch with some aluminum foil and tape (my jig broke, I guess), and besides all that all you need is a decent microsd card and the willingness to follow directions
An absurd amount of marketing, mainly. Very easy to shove YA/childrens books down kids throats, they don’t have a lot of natural exposure to literature. Fuck, eragorn was the best example of the YA industry pushing a bad series (they even tried a movie series), I remember loaning it from my school library and being legitimately confused as to why it was becoming popular. I ended up finding a weird romance+fantasy series at the time that I largely consider as not being actually good, but remember finding it way more engaging. Maybe it’s better now that kids are largely terminally online.
It’s really my biggest gripe with it. There’s better fantasy, better wizard centric fantasy, and better YA books out there. It’s not great by any means, and I’m not surprised that I dropped the series without finishing it as a kid because I was reading much better stuff by the time the last few books came out.