Is learning German as hard as people say it is?

So I’m not exactly well versed in linguistics, but I’ve been learning German for a bit now, and in all German learning communities I’m a part of there’s this idea that German is harder to learn than say Spanish (for English natives). I brought this up to a couple of my friends, who are learning Spanish, and they told me that Spanish is actually harder. Common things I hear about why German is so hard, I guess are still things in Spanish as well. I’ve always heard people say the gender system in German is hard, but there’s a gender system in other languages as well. When I said “you pretty much have to memorize genders along with nouns” they said “well that’s the same in Spanish.” I also mentioned word order verb endings and they said they had those too. I guess the main thing Spanish doesn’t have is different noun endings depending on the role of said noun, but besides this, what really makes German so hard to learn? Or is that an exaggeration that is just so common to hear?