> Further to this point, it's quite common to favour a candidate with a strong STEM degree who has learned to code as an adjacency.

... because they know less about programming, and thus think much less deeply how a novel abstraction could look like which solves the problem much more elegantly.

In other words: these applicants more obediently do their work instead of regularly questioning whether there could be a better way and thus rocking the boat too much. :-(