This feels like a massive straw man.
To me, keyboard dog was always just one half of the “two states of a programmer” meme, with the other half being “I am a digital god” or “I am the one”. It’s a relatable celebration of the agony and the ecstasy of the failure-experiment-breakthrough-epiphany cycle we experience when we do any coding outside of our comfort zone, or have to debug a particularly tricky issue. Every programmer I know immediately vibes with that meme, seniority notwithstanding.