The ability to code is not generally important, and in no way is comparable to literacy.

Coding skills are different depending on the language and the kind of language, but what they all have in common is the ability and patience to think algorithmically: step by step, in terms of relevant primitive operations.

You don’t need ever to have written code to be able to think algorithmically, and the ability to think algorithmically does not translate into the ability or willingness to think critically about complex systems.