> The struggle was never to learn programming syntax
For 85-90% of devs, yes this was the struggle. Creating and updating rows in a database from user input is all the “domain modeling” there is in most software. That’s what is solved by AI and it’s the majority of software dev.
You are confusing syntax with knowledge of the libraries.
The struggle is not where to put a semicolon. The struggle is, how do I handle validation problem X with framework Y.
Learning syntax takes a weekend. Learning to approach problems analytically and algorithmically takes much longer, and is the only "hard part" of computer programming.