As someone who recently started learning to code, I would agree with that statement wholeheartedly. Learning how the pieces fit together is the most difficult part, by far.
No, I disagree with the quoted statement. Coding is hard. Try writing some code and letting it sit for 6 months. Then try to add a new feature.
Do you remember what display_user_data() does? How does that differ from format_user_data()? Wait, why did I write three model-querying subroutines when one would suffice? Oh, but now I'm passing six parameters into this subroutine...
I'm excited for everyone learning to code this year. It's a great time to learn! But remember that your code needs to (a) make sense in its design, and (b) make sense in its design six months from now. Does your code make sense after taking a vacation, working on other projects, and forgetting the abstractions you rolled with?
It's easy to learn just html. Or to just learn if/then statements or for/loops. Or just hosting a site.
Something that could teach how to put the whole package together would be immensely valuable. The closest I've seen is the Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl.
I'd love to see something similar done for different tech stacks.