Someone that describes programming like that is strongly suspect IMO.
> I'm not wasting mental bandwidth typing out a dozen React components full of the same-old state management, form processing code, etc.
Why haven't you abstracted that away already? Like building a UI library.
> I'm not trawling through charting library docs, looking for the precise combination of settings to make my chart's x-axis ticks labels rotate 45 degrees.
There's a method to actually read library docs to find what you need. This seems like someone complaining about the effort to do research with a book, but forgot to use the table of contents and the index and instead starts on page 1.
> My mental energy is focussed on figuring out what solution is actually _right_, not the minutiae of how to persuade the computer to do it.
You don't persuade a computer, you just translate the solution that is right. That's what coding is, merely translating. And to do that well, you need to know both languages: The domain and the computer platform. If you don't know the computer platform, you can't translate an idea. It would be like trying to speak French without knowing French. Yes you can try with Google Translate, but machine translated texts can be quite horrible to the native speaker. Same with using AI to generate code.