It's not possible to be a "productive" musician on a traditional instrument (i.e. excluding iPads) without knowing how to play scales, chords, etc.
They do make idiot managers happy though, because look at all those features and scrum points they “finished!” That’s why armies of them will always be there in the software ecosystem, blithely and ignorantly a net drain on whatever unlucky company is currently employing them, busily making a mess for more diligent programmers to clean up for the rest of eternity. It’s called “job security.”
That’s demands for faster delivery of software and ridiculous demands on user experience.
Does looking down on higher level devs make you feel superior or something like that?
Absolutely not. It's about bloat. Many times people "just want to code" or eschew optimizing repeating the mantra that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" that you often end up with bloated software.
As someone who has played guitar on and off for years as a hobby, I'm shocked by how much harder it is than programming.
I can pick up almost any random codebase on GitHub, and as long as they use libraries and don't touch low level stuff, I can probably start working with it in 10 minutes to a day at most.
Then, I could leave that project for a year and be almost as productive as when I left. So much of the action is on the screen, not in the head, and there's no muscle memory required.
If any instrument was as easy as coding... I think a lot of coders might have music careers instead....