The fact that people get college degrees in graphic design, yet we think we can duplicate their skills with little effort shows an amazing degree of hubris. This is like business people mocking programmers and saying that anyone could do it.
As a comparison: While a skilled sculptist is undoubtetly better at his craft than a mechanic, the latter can take pride in finishing off a machine part just as much as the sculptist, and to an untrained eye, the parts display an equal amount of skill.
Learning-by-doing gets you far. Actually investing the time and studying the field gets you further, but is more expensive.
No one has said you can "duplicate their skills". What the article is suggesting is that you use a framework with great design engineered in: Tailwind. In the case of Tailwind you'll benefit from the collected UI work of Adam Wathan and about 200 others.
Sure it takes a little time to learn, you could probably short-circuit that process with more effort, and there are greater heights to be achieved with sufficient dedication, but the majority of programming just isn't that difficult. Just about anyone _could_ do it with a little effort.
That's also ignoring the compounding effects of education. People get college degrees in graphic design, but a couple of those years are shared between majors, some sizeable fraction of the unique couple years of training are dedicated to learning how to _efficiently_ perform certain tasks, and some other sizeable fraction is UI/UX knowledge that's somewhat duplicated in other fields. Is there really that much hubris in saying that some kinds of relatedly skilled professionals might only need to put in a little effort to equate to the ~<1yrs of unique effort obtained in a graphic design degree, especially when the professional in question doesn't need to use the entire degree and especially when learning is moderately accelerated by having learned other tangential things to hang the new knowledge on?
Maybe yes, but if so I don't think it's obvious enough to warrant a single-line dismissal.
I can design stuff, a bit, but at the sort of level of someone in the programming world scouring stack-overflow and putting parts together, and maybe coming up with something new (in the sense of new to me, it probably exists a great many times over already).
Some design “properly”, from fundamental building blocks and existing ideas, applying the right tools for the job. Much like I program a lot of the time.
A degree in graphics design isn't that though. There you'll be shown the fundamentals being derived from first principles, and the better students will be expected in future to maybe come up with new ideas/fundamentals.
Being a designer and having a design degree differ in a very similar way to being a developer and having a computer science degree.
Don't need a college degree for making software either