I'm with you on this feeling. There was always a component of this, IBM certainly pitched programming as a trade (COBOL) since the 50s, MS targeted managers and

I'm with you on this feeling. There was always a component of this, IBM certainly pitched programming as a trade (COBOL) since the 50s, MS targeted managers and C-levels with promises of 5x developer productivity to sell Windows NT over Unix, and then there's the concept of "business logic", which relegates programming for its own sake to the nether regions. The retro computing scene may have some of what you're looking for.