said it would be easy

Ah, the innocence of inexperience. (Giving them the benefit of the doubt of course. )

I work on old undocumented c/c++ spaghetti code for embedded systems. In multiple planning meetings I have gotten to use lines like "this looks like a single character change but testing it makes me really nervous" and have gotten zero pushback or raised eyebrows.

It's usually a few laughs and often another engineer or our manager will chime in to agree with me and describe some more of the context or whatever, lol.