No, that call isn’t difficult. What is more difficult are examples given on things like Angular University, where there are pipe, subscribe, catchError, among others, in a single call chain. It’s not obvious to me at all what the order of execution is in this call chain for instance:

    http$
        .pipe(
            map(res =>     res['payload']),
            catchError(err =>     {
                console.log('caught mapping error and rethrowing', err);
                return throwError(err);
            }),
            finalize(() =>     console.log("first finalize() block executed")),
            catchError(err =>     {
                console.log('caught rethrown error, providing fallback value');
                return of([]);
            }),
             finalize(() => console.log("second finalize() block executed"))
    )
        .subscribe(
            res => console.log('HTTP response', res),
            err =>     console.log('HTTP Error', err),
            () =>     console.log('HTTP request completed.')
    );

Once you see the output it begins to finally make sense but intuitive it is not