I agree, you can do awesome things without too much coding knowledge—but a big part of the current push to teach people how to code is to give them access to the coding job market.

If I'm going to hire you as a "software engineer" at an engineering salary, I expect you to know all those things.

Of my friends learning to code for masters degrees now, the ones with a natural coding mindset and studying it hard are taking about 2 years to hit a production engineering level. Most seem to be on a 3-4 year trajectory. That's pretty reasonable for a complex skillset.