This makes me suspect you haven't had much exposure to trades. Getting good... really good... at welding, or cabinetry, or stairbuilding, takes at least as much dedication and skill as getting good at programming.
Note that there are plenty of programming jobs and tasks that are boring, repetitive, easy to do, and of little impact to the underlying system, that really need to be done by human. Things along the lines of modifying a report, extracting some data on a request from other departments, or adding a button to an Android application.
Somebody still needs to do them, because they're often virtually impossible to automate away, but you don't want to waste a really good programmer on something like that, and a really good programmer usually will not want to do them either.