It is not the case that every programmer has to know SQL (if it ever was). Programming is now such a big field that plenty of people will go their whole career

It is not the case that every programmer has to know SQL (if it ever was). Programming is now such a big field that plenty of people will go their whole careers without knowledge that's foundational for other programmers - whether it be SQL, linear algebra, memory management, distributed systems, ... In a way, it's very cool. Instead of a single-dimensional "how good a programmer are you", we've got a multidimensional space. That, naturally, yields a lot more interesting corners, like, say, what could be invented by someone who knows a lot about databases and GPUs.