I so strongly disagree with this. Strong coding ability is easily the most important quality I look for in my interns. For everyone else some level of coding ability is required - there is definitely some floor below which you cannot function. But anything beyond a junior engineer what I'm looking for is understanding of how coding solves a problem. How can you map requirements to scope your solutions, how does the end application shape the architecture of what you're going to write.
I think this points at a certain problem with software hiring, where you'll put a candidate through 10 interviews all of which test the same thing and if they get lucky you hire them. if they get unlucky and miss an optimization or assumption or trick in one of the interviews, too bad. Might as well do 1 coding interview per candidate, then take the resumes of all the people who pass and throw half of them in the bin - because you don't want to hire unlucky people.
What we're really often saying is "We haven't actually figured out what makes a good engineer and how to test it so we're just going to only test coding skills repeatedly".