the whole Sketch -> Invision -> Figma pipeline was quick — never seen incumbents displaced so quickly.
Invision never replaced Sketch. Invision took Sketch designs, and tried to make them interactive. They were a tandem.
Also, Sketch is still alive with diehard users.
The tools before the mobile era, the canceled Adobe Thermo (aka Flash Catalyst), Microsoft Expression Blend, and recently Framer (which now is a website creation tool like Webflow), tried to fill the gap between design, prototyping, and implementation. But, they failed because web frameworks move fast, and nobody wants a vendor lock-in of unmaintainable code.
Maybe the Figma killer finally finds a way to solve it in a way that makes designers and developers happy.
At the moment it looks like UXPin is going in this direction.
On the other hand, if by "writing code" we mean the literal act of writing something that both a human and a computer can understand, then that's a different question. Designers need to express nuance, and GUI tools are limited in their ability to handle complexity. There's a reason visual programming tools haven't overtaken code.
What I'm getting at is that there very well could be a "language" specifically tailored for UI/UX designers, that allows them to specify their design decisions for the presentational layer of the application. If you had such a language, you could create a toolchain on top of it, which produces real code for developers to consume however they wish.
I'm (slowly but steadily) working on this exact thing: https://matry.design