Learning just enough R (or Julia or Python) for the purposes of making replicable, easily updated, easily styled, easily adjusted tables and figures for research is something that a freshman in social sciences and humanities can handle. And for many academics that level of knowledge is enough for grad school and eventually even tenure.

That level of knowledge will not necessarily include even the most rudimentary software engineering skills: the code will (most likely) live in a single long file. That file will contain both working chunks of code, old/broken/redundant chunks of code as well as comments and notes both related and unrelated to the task at hand. It will never be executable in a linear fashion (only chunks at a time in a REPL). And some data importing or package/library management will still have to be done through a GUI.