>>but you can clearly get pretty far without having that sort of mastery over a particular language.

Completely agree. If this weren't true, the fizzbuzz test wouldn't exist.

The 90s were filled with businessmen creating Access databases that wouldn't scale, and Visual Basic's drag-and-drop capabilities created a cottage industry for controls consumed by non-programmers.

That's both good and bad. Bad for the obvious reasons (lots of crap software) but good in that for the most part people were able to build what they needed to solve problems and move on.