This is what I believe sometimes.
Then I look at all the pitfalls of shell scripts and how the time investments on automation tasks just balloon… then not so much. :)
But if people have a different experience with that then I don’t doubt it.
The trick, though, IMO, is not having a programmer solve the problem but getting people with domain expertise literate enough to write some hacky Python scripts.
This is, in my honest opinion, the next leap forward in terms of productivity.
But there were always great poets and authors. The big win was that you got a bureaucrat class with their own domain titles who could use writing to get things done.
Likewise if the boss in the original article had been taught how to hack some scripts together, they wouldn't need to hire the author for $90k.
Until we needed a machine to run it, with good security controls, high availability... blah blah blah.
We're at the point where most people can find low hanging fruit by reading a Python blog in a weekend, but in my experience the IT infrastructure isn't setup to easily do everything else.