To someone who isn't a "coder" it may be difficult to tell the difference between someone cranking out landing pages with HTML and CSS, and someone building the checkout flow for a different part of the same app. If you were uninitiated and saw both colleagues working with text editors (with fancy syntax highlighting) and the command line, you'd probably call them both coders. Superficially, the work looks similar. The semantic change you've noticed could possibly be attributed to the tremendous increase in web development in the last decade.