I'm old enough to remember when such arguments were had about 'real art' coming from pens, pencils and brushes, not programs. Took a good long time for 'digital art' became a category.
Digital artwork being presenting at an oil painting conference would cause similar confusion and outrage for the same reasons.
This too will pass. Soon everything is going to be rendered at 60hz in real time, and demands that everything needs to be rendered by hand will be as absurd as claiming every frame of a 3D game needs to be hand rendered in Photoshop.
This time around the response as been aggressively adversarial. Not only do they disapprove of the new thing but anyone who express a contrary opinion is considered a target.