I've worked in enterprise software dev and testing, a big financial corp, on a small bioinformatic data export contract project, and now in a bioinformatics group in a pure research setting where the focus is on the science and not on programming except as a support to the science.
I strongly believe that deep tech skills with extensive domain specific knowledge is the most valuable combo in all those environments. If you can quickly soak up domain specific knowledge as even an average developer, you're going to be well respected and thought of. I'm not great at this part, but do well simply by having reasonable communication skills - it's flat out amazing how many tech folks fail based on bad people skills.
Honestly though, I think expectations are so low, so often that people are completely willing to put up with really low quality results if they can simply pay bottom dollar for coders. This ties in with organization culture in any of those environments - it will far and away be the dominant factor in your ability to be successful programming. If the culture is restrictive or narrow-minded, you'll struggle.
Maybe Zed is trying to drive home that there is lot of headcount floating around in tech companies with a job title that would lead you to think they were doing a bunch of development, but they amount to magic TPF report generators. The other option, and one that I love stumbling into, is that there are some tremendously smart people in those fields he mentions who have taught themselves to code to do cool hacking in the field. I find that as an "officially credentialed" CS type, many of these people have picked up a significant amount of what I spent more than a few years in formal education pursuing.