Not joking, no. AZERTY (France, Belgium) and QWERTZ (German-speaking countries) don’t have shifted keys for { and }, they’re accessed with the AltGr key, which lives where US layouts have the right Alt key. So instead of fluently hitting one of two big shift keys, you have to hit one small Alt key.
They’re also on number keys, this is particularly annoying for QWERTZ, where the numbers are 7 and 0, I encourage you to try and type right-Alt-0 and right-Alt-7 for a sense of how badly this sucks. With AZERTY it’s 4 and 5, so typing it with both hands is not as bad.
I know about this mainly from German programmers complaining about it, for the record, rather than out of some Special Interest in international keyboard layouts. Programmers in those countries often switch to a less onerous keyboard layout when programming, or just switch period.