Just because academics are easy for a child does not meen that they do not experience the dynamic of being challenged, failure, and success through effort in other areas of their life.
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Is it so horrible that some things are effortless or nearly so for some children?
Depends. Perversely perhaps, I think that if it's something the child doesn't really find important, there's no problem if they find it easy. I think if we're talking about something that's a strength area and an interest for the child, then yes, I think it's horrible if the child finds everything in that area easy as a child. That's what happened to me in maths, and it was horrible, because what happened was that I learned (subliminally at least) that this was an area that ought to be easy for me. I had no experience with having to work at it, nothing on which to base a feeling that it was OK to find it hard. The fact that I'd found plenty of
other things hard didn't really help (though perhaps it would have been even worse if I hadn't!) However, maths becomes challenging for everyone who goes far enough with it (even the best mathematician in the world, whoever that is, can't do everything without effort at that world-leading research level!) So a natural consequence of liking maths and being good at it was that I was eventually going to reach a level where it was hard. For me, that didn't happen until well into my university career, at which point it was difficult to cope with because I had to undo the categorisation of maths as something I ought always to find easy.
Now in drafting this, I wrote, "maths, like almost anything worth spending your life on, becomes hard...". Yet it's true, some people do go through life choosing to do things they find pretty easy, choosing not to challenge themselves. In other words, some people do find it worth spending their lives on things that are not challenging to them. I actually think that's a valid choice for an individual to make (I remember being taught differently, but that's another matter). Arguably, for those people, it doesn't matter whether they've ever learned to cope with challenge in their strength areas or not. Still, if they have learned that, then they can feel they've really made a choice not to follow a life path that involves challenging themselves, rather than having no option because they are unable to deal with challenging themselves - wouldn't we all want our children to have that choice?
