> because personal politics or identity issues or whatever were wholly divorced from writing code to make computers do things

I'd disagree there. The free-software movement, for example, is fundamentally tied up with a certain set of political-moral principles; the open-source movement is similarly tied up with a somewhat different set of principles.

If someone's "not political" then maybe they're a weathervane, or professionally neutral, but it's probably more likely that what they think of as "politics" isn't currently fighting over a topic of salience to them.