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Not trying to create a positive feedback loop here, but I concur. My personal experience could point to as much as 95% of "programming" time being entirely independent once taken into account: reading articles/guides/tutorials, debugging, "playing around with" new tools/languages/frameworks.

I suspect that it varies by environment. I have worked in environments where it is 95% alone and other environments where it is 95% collaboration. Some places actually do "pair programming".

Software developers are not unique in spending lots of working time alone. Plenty of other careers, virtually all of them with something closer to gender parity, demand extensive, solitary contemplation.

There's a lot of faffing about and bike-shedding that occurs in the other 70% of the time, but very little work gets done.