Nowadays programmers like to think about themselves as special, but in reality the ability to write simple programs to process input and give output will be just as a normal skill in the future as writing a report is now.Where input and output respectively can have inordinate amounts of meanings and manifestations.
Now, sure, someone writing a quick 4-line script using a hugely abstracted Python library to obtain a value from some document format will probably be a normal skill.
Writing just about anything substantial requires large amounts of domain-specific knowledge, specialized skillsets and lots of patience.
It's something that actually requires an individual to have legitimate interest in their field - the same way a writer would probably be far more invested in linguistics than a layman, and make it an aspect of their expertise and life skills.
In contrast, the average person would use code as a means to an end, likely under the confines of a system that makes the act of writing code be as separated from the workings of the machine as much as possible. Someone parsing CSV doesn't mean they can now write a distributed file system, for instance.
The fact of the matter is that we simply do not have the tooling to make programming as easy as 1-2-3. Comparing it to writing isn't even adequate. The analogy would only make sense if the average person needed to know dozens of grammars (protocols) to express themselves in language, among other constraints. They don't. There's a world of difference between practical computing and some sugary ideal of everyone coding like it's their second nature.
There's nothing wrong with people picking up programming if they need it. I'm far more content with letting people discover it themselves rather than diluting it by making it a compulsory school subject.
Programmers will only be as special as book writers are nowadays - just a little better in putting words-code together so their work has bigger impact.
I'd wager this devaluing mindset of computation as an end goal where you simply piece together this magical substance known as "code" (or rockstar/ninja it, whatever) is a major reason why our software is so entangled, brittle and unable to communicate as it is today. An end result being that it makes programming more and more esoteric and inaccessible - something the "learn to code" evangelists should be concerned about.