Spreadsheets replaced developers for that kind of work, while simultaneously enabling multiple magnitudes more work of that type to be performed.
So now instead of one developer lost and one analyst created, you've actually just created an analyst and kept a developer.
Citizen developers were already there doing Excel. I have seen basically full fledged applications in Excel since I was in high school which was 25 years ago already.
It feels like programming then got a lot harder with internet stuff that brought client-server challenges, web frontends, cross platform UI and build challenges, mobile apps, tablets, etc... all bringing in elaborate frameworks and build systems and dependency hell to manage and move complexity around.
With that context, it seems like the AI experience / productivity boost people are having is almost like a regression back to the mean and just cutting through some of the layers of complexity that had built up over the years.