Twenty years down the pike I've gotten pretty solid at programming, certainly not genius-level but competent.
I agree strongly that making art anyone cares anout is massively harder than being a competent programmer. In both you need strong technical abilities to be effective, but intuition and a deep grasp of human psychology are really crucial in art - almost table stakes.
Because software dev is usually practical, a craft, you can get paid decently with far less brilliance and fire than will suffice to make an artist profitable.
...though perhaps the DNN code assist tools will change that soon.