> If there's a better way to teach the same concepts without actually programming, that would be really useful. In a pragmatic sense, it's not helpful to the cause.

These seem contradictory. We can either teach a narrow swatch of people to "code" or we can search for other ways to impart the important bit: modeling. The entire argument of the essay is that we should be looking for those "really useful" ways.

> If a time-strapped journalist comes across a highly-upvoted blog post on a tech site

I'm not sure focusing on getting a message out to someone who won't read the entire post is a worthwhile pursuit.