There is a very low cap on career growth if you are purely focused on programming.
So yes, if you want to climb the corporate ladder or run your own business, programming is a fraction of the skills required.
I think though it's okay to just focus on coding. It's fun and why many of us got into the industry. Not everyone likes the business side of things and that's okay.
There is no inherent value to producing software, as there may be in producing car tires or bananas. The best software is no software.
And then who is the better programmer, the one who knows more about how to make software, or the one who knows more about what software to make?
There is an inherent value in programming, just like there is one in gardening, woodworking, producing art, or playing a musical instrument.
The value is in the joy that the activity brings. (Note that this tends to be a different kind of value than business value.)
Do you imagine that we just somehow evolve capabilities beyond it? or do we eventually produce universally perfect software solutions and leave it at that?
If I hire you to make software for me, I don't really want software; I want a problem to go away, a money stream built, a client to be happy. Of course, that probably requires you to build software, unless you invent a magic wand. But if you had the magic wand, I'd choose it every single time over software.
Not so with food, furniture or a fancy hotels, where I actually want the thing.
The magic wand argument doesn't make sense. Then you can also get everything else.
Eh, I disagree. I like a lot of the software I'm using. There's inherent value to producing music with Ableton, cutting videos with Final Cut Pro, or just playing Super Mario for entertainment. Those are all more software than no software.