My anecdotal evidence is exactly opposite to the paper. I would expect the title of the paper to appear as a headline trotted out in some mass media publication

My anecdotal evidence is exactly opposite to the paper. I would expect the title of the paper to appear as a headline trotted out in some mass media publication with the article written by a journo that dabbled in BASIC in high school and decided that programming and software development wasn't for him. Maybe I've forgotten what it is like to not be able to program, in the same way I don't understand how to not swim, or how to not ride a bike, or how to not read and write, but learning a new language, learning it well, to be facile in the language and the standard APIs that come with the language (ignoring the tens of thousands of obscure little npm packages in javascript for instance) is not a huge amount of work.