Programming has arguably never been the most important part of making video games though, except when people stuff it up and a game doesn't run well on the hardware people want to play it on.

Story, design, game mechanics...these all have something in common, and it's that at a moderate sized studio they're not even slightly the programmers job.

Arguably if you wanted to make games then now is the best time to do it because a lot of the boilerplate won't be in your way.

I agree with this in general and that a game in theory is so much more than code. The the one caveat is that code is the ultimate bottleneck of games. Assets, story, mechanics, design are all mediated my code and that code complexity is what limits scope.

Also, a lot of these aspects are touted as stuff that AI is so good good at: AI can write better fiction, AI can design better, AI can produce better art, AI can infinitely churn out 3D models, etc. There are people 100% sincerely drumming the same beat that we see here concerning code for all these areas... and yet something really isn't there yet.