Astroturf was just artificial plastice on top of concrete with just some padding underneath. As it got older, the padding wore out. Baseball on artificial turf wasn’t as bad as football, but it was still hard on players’ knees. I can remember football at Busch stadium in St. Louis resulted in many player injuries. The NFL owners pay these guys enough to worry about the field damaging their investment in the players.
There are many kinds of artificial turf. Astroturf was a particularly awful version.
Natural turf has this habit of suddenly giving way, and can be very hard too where the grass is killed and the soil dried out.
The worst turf was in old Veterans Stadium in Philly.