I think some of that is from when the book came out and the idea of the internet was novel and still very conceptual. Since a lot of people who built the internet were fans of the book they kind of designed the internet based on their imaginings from the book, so it's no longer novel and conceptual. Readers have near constant experience with the net or and have seen it depicted in hundreds of pop entertainment. So it's not as hard to read as it was 40ish years ago when it came out b/c you get the idea of hacking through a network pretty intuitively, or at least have pop images ready to slot into your imagination when you come across it.