You're demonstrating the exact syndrome the story discusses: conflating the ability to write code "well" with all the other things one does as a software engineer. The article goes into more detail, but I do a fair number of things every day that do not involve typing in code on a keyboard.

Going further, I would argue that most people I know who've been programming since they were 12 weren't even writing very good code at 22 (or whenever they left college and entered the working world). It's vanishingly rare that people were writing flexible, maintainable code in their teens. It's much more common that they were coding to scratch an itch, and that their code only solves the pieces of the problem they cared about, and probably not very well.

Note: I've been programming since I was 12.