For something that was supposedly always unimportant, huge amounts of energy were spent recruiting developers based on how they produced and interacted with code.

FizzBuzz was a litmus test that showed how hopeless the average developer was. Coding interviews were the real test of programming ability. Now we're being told none of that ever mattered for real?

We should just admit that the game has changed (possibly, I'm not 100% convinced). Code WAS the bottleneck and coding ability was the bottleneck, but it may not be going forward.