If you have been told, gently or otherwise, that this wave is for younger people or technical people, I want to push back on that directly. The people selling that story are usually selling the cure for it too.
Here is the truth from someone who does this every day. If you can write a clear email, you already have the core skill. Working with an assistant is mostly writing plainly what you want, reading what comes back, and saying no, more like this. That is a conversation, not a programming language. You have had ten thousand of those.
The fear is not silly. There is real hype, real nonsense, and real people talking past you on purpose so you feel you need them. But the tool itself is patient, cheap, and does not care how old you are or whether you finished a computer course. It will explain the same thing five different ways until one lands.
Start this small. Take the longest message you sent this week, paste it in, and ask for it to be cut in half without losing anything that matters. Read both versions. That is it. You just did the thing. Do one of those a week and in a month you will be more capable with this than most of the people posting about it.