I’m old enough to remember the late 90s when lots of “teach kids to kode” efforts were spun up and then torn down a few years later when the dottcom crash hit. The general public thought technology was going the way of textiles and all the gumption to teach coding evaporated overnight.

My high school went from having 3 jam-packed programming classes to a single AP class that barely had enrollment.

My father was a machinist, and I saw in high school that there was no future in that in the US and went into software, which at the time was a hot field. But it was clear to me once the Internet made outsourcing these kinds of tasks trivial that coding would become commoditized. (I actually also thought that basic software construction would be largely automated by now lol.) It occurred to me a while ago that "programming" in the traditional sense is more or less the "blue-collar job" of the 21st century. And these jobs will follow the route of the blue-collar jobs of the 20th century in the US.

Are people still doing menial tasks that can be automated by computers? Yes? Then there is a shortage of people who can code.

You wouldn't argue against people learning math just because there are billions of people who can add numbers at $15 / hour. The point of teaching kids to code is not to make them all professional software engineers but to give them basic skills to automate the boring stuff. If that makes a greater pool of people who can do machine learning or whatever the current shortage is, then those skills can be used to solve more problems than just targeting ads and playing zero sum trading games.

anyone pushing the “teach kids to kode” mantra in Western schools or the myth of the tech talent shortage wants this to be the case -

the opinionated well paid tech workers who have more hard skills than the managers are a political threat..