Totally agree. In my college classes at a prestigious school, well over 15 years ago, only a tiny fraction of the students in class could actually code to any reasonable degree. Maybe 10% or less. The rest were there to do the bare minimum required, never developed a deeper understanding of any of it, and were just hoping to land a cushy job once outside of school.
Coding is more than just rote memorization of constructs. To do a good job with it you need to have a deep understanding of many related concepts at once (algorithmic complexity, memory usage, network latency, threading). Even the best AIs today cannot write novel code that does all these things well or even correctly.