I mean, to some degree definitely yes. You do need some upfront knowledge and some editing steps can be quite tedious.
I zone out while shoving shapes around the place, so I actually enjoy doing it in my freetime.

Having said that, we are talking about icons. You usually don't want those to be particularly complex anyways.
But the SVG format is also more powerful than one might expect.
You've got a collection of basic shapes. Particularly, paths allow you to draw essentially anything, including some really useful curves. And you can also do some cool gradients and even animations.

And you can use fonts in the text element, but only like in HTML, i.e. you specify "bold" or "Times New Roman" and hope wherever it's displayed has that font available. Would definitely not recommend that for an icon.
Inkscape allows converting text to a path, so that it doesn't depend on the host system. So, if I ever want a font in an icon, I'd do that in Inkscape and then copy the path element that it created into my text editor.