That is not "computer science" any more than spotting constellations makes you an astrophysicist.
Are you suggesting that those developers who lack a CS degree but can program effectively nonetheless don't really know "computer science," and therefore are weaker applicants?
By extension, are you suggesting that most developer jobs have a need for applicants well-versed in Turing machines, automata, language parsing, trie data structures, and so on?
You seem to be saying that demonstrating strong coding ability doesn't correlate to strong academic CS ability, but I can't imagine why you would bother to point this out unless you felt it was strongly relevant, in which case you must also be suggesting some variant of the above arguments.
In the formal sense, pretty much - most actual CS is pretty irrelevant to day to day development as it's pretty much a specialized branch of maths (note that the CS department I did a degree at is now part of a maths department so I'm perhaps a bit biased).
"strong coding ability doesn't correlate to strong academic CS ability"
Again I would agree with this - I had a supervisor who never wrote any code but he was very well regarded in his niche area - his area was purely mathematical.
you can learn computer science without needing a degree at all
Then proceeded to give an example of programming, which is not the same thing.
I agree with the assertion that one can be a successful programmer without a CS degree but let's call a spade a spade.