Conversely, there are a lot of places on the internet that think that unless you have a BS in Comp Sci, and work in Silicon Valley, Bay Area, or NYC, you aren't

Conversely, there are a lot of places on the internet that think that unless you have a BS in Comp Sci, and work in Silicon Valley, Bay Area, or NYC, you aren't a "real programmer", you're just some code monkey that can throw together a few npm packages. I think programming doesn't get compared to art as much as it should. There are certain metrics of "good" and "bad", but there is a lot of gray are and subjectivity. In the golden age of Disney animation, you'd be a fool to say any of their animators were bad artists, but there were definitely better among them. There are also perfectly mediocre comic book artists who still make a healthy living. There is art with quality that is entirely subjective. All of this applies to code. The best senior dev on the backend team of a small company is probably a garbage coder compared to the new guy at some Bay Area startup. Code that one team calls elegant and amazing may be called overly complex and unnecessarily clever by another. At the end of the day, being a programmer is easy. Being a great programmer is hard. Like many things in life, you can get a lot better if you practice at it a lot more, +/- the "talent" modifier. But at the end of the day if you can do basic 8th grade pre-algebra, and speak english, you probably have the education needed to be able to program professionally, its just a matter of learning the syntax and patterns.