Sure - as long as we admit that by "meritocracy" we mean "the people who have had the good fortune in life to be able to practice a thing" and not "the people who are most intrinsically skilled at a thing". If we're honest about that, we can then reason about other consequences: one natural one is that we'd have
better programmers if we actively took steps as a culture to allow more people the ability to have time to practice a thing, because intrinsic ability does vary quite a bit, and our best programmers are now just the intersection of high intrinsic ability + high opportunity to practice. (I'm leaving "culture" deliberately underdefined: there are things we can do solely within tech to give junior devs more support for growing their skills while on the clock, and there are things we can do as a broader society.)
Also, I'd argue that this analysis doesn't apply to all "programming related jobs", just those that are primarily about programming. Very quickly in my career, the most important thing wasn't the ability to write code myself, it was the ability to make sense of code that other people have written, work with teams to develop code together, understand customer needs, take existing code and make it more reliable, pay down technical debt, etc. But all the side projects on my GitHub are solo work that is essentially for show: if I churn out some code that happens to work and has no testing or security or resilience to future changes, that's not a problem at all, as long as I push some code that works. That skillset is extremely different from the skillset I use at work.