Hangul is really only impressive if you're a native English speaker. It's probably somewhere between German and French in terms of ease of use and nothing special in that regard. Of course the cultural bubble of Korea includes Chinese languages and Japanese so the bar to be considered a simple writing system is incredibly low. But every single alphabet would meet those expectations. Amongst writing systems that use alphabets, Hangul is probably in the middle.
A lot of the difficulty of reading Korean comes from double letters (when you have 4 letters in a syllable) where it's not necessarily clear which one to pronounce, diphthongs that lost their original pronunciation so the spelling changed a lot., letters at the end of a syllable get reduced down to a smaller set of sounds and the fact that Korean as a language cares more about aspiration than voicing resulting in, for a western ear, very minor differences that are explicitly expressed in the writing system (ㅂ vs ㅍ) and very big differences that are implied (밥 is [pap̚] but 보리밥 is [poɾibap̚]).
I like that people get excited about languages but it's kinda nuts how the English speaking Internet celebrates Hangul as this genius invention of a writing system that makes perfect sense when it is just an averagely well maintained alphabetical writing system.
A lot of the difficulty of reading Korean comes from double letters (when you have 4 letters in a syllable) where it's not necessarily clear which one to pronounce, diphthongs that lost their original pronunciation so the spelling changed a lot., letters at the end of a syllable get reduced down to a smaller set of sounds and the fact that Korean as a language cares more about aspiration than voicing resulting in, for a western ear, very minor differences that are explicitly expressed in the writing system (ㅂ vs ㅍ) and very big differences that are implied (밥 is [pap̚] but 보리밥 is [poɾibap̚]).
I like that people get excited about languages but it's kinda nuts how the English speaking Internet celebrates Hangul as this genius invention of a writing system that makes perfect sense when it is just an averagely well maintained alphabetical writing system.