Would you expect all sysadmins to become programmers?
And back in the day sysadmins wrote programs like tcp_wrappers, postfix, sendmail, etc. It was definitely common and encouraged if not expected.
The idea that system admins should be able to get away with never professionally stepping up to doing programming is a late-90s/early-00s aberration that was generated by the need to scale up during the dot com boom before good automation practices existed. And it is not a good thing and it stunts intellectual growth. Devops is in some sense back-to-the-future by tearing down an artificial wall that never should have been made in the first place.
Sure, lots of systems people program and love programming, but the job isn't to write write tcp_wrappers, postfix, sendmail etc. it's to do what's needed to make sure that such things run, which is a different kind of programming.
My take is:
The complex admin work will be going to the cloud providers.
The rest (besides some niche stuff) will get so simple a programmer can do it on the side.
Admins that don't learn to program are left behind. Only those who have some cushy full time employment, were they can't be let go, will remain.
While I personally am a Software Engineer + Systems Engineer combination perfect for modern Devops... I do not agree with you one bit.
There will always be a place for non-programming systems administrators -- especially as we get more and more systems over time.
Will those administrators be able to /scale/ to managing 100s or 1000s of system without learning some sort of programming language or configuration management system? Probably not.
However, there are plenty of businesses out there that only have a handful of servers and services which can totally (and more cheaply) be managed manually.
Automation has an up-front cost that doesn't always make sense for the business to spend.