I've never met a single developer saying refactors are easy. It's always a minefield.

In the only scenario where that could actually be true you wouldn't have coworkers creating unmaintainable code with LLMs now.

If you were fortunate enough to be working in a project with very good test coverage, refactors were easier (maybe not easy) in the sense that you were at least fairly confident that nothing broke.

But I've personally never worked on code with test coverage that good. Refactors were always risky.