[0]: My personal definition of addiction is, if you were to stop doing X activity for a week cold turkey, would you experience withdrawal symptoms?
The author's scope is maybe too narrow by focusing only on programmers. Perhaps this problem can be generalized to a type of individual that requires the flow state to the extent that their other behavior is perturbed or dysfunctional. Compare Richard Feynman's explosive rage when distracted from calculus or drums...
More to the point, there aren't any other rewards than dopamine. Dopamine is literally what a reward is in the brain. Unless you're just never going to do anything rewarding, this is inescapable.
> someone who may be suffering from what I can only really describe as coding addiction, the solution may be to find healthier rewards.
If your definition of addiction is dopaminergenic action, then you're simply proposing another addiction here, because you're just proposing a different dopaminergenic action besides coding here.
Instead, the author has a pre-determined value judgement of what is a "good" or "bad" allocation of priorities. From that premise, he works backwards to a observation that coding can be addictive. This addictiveness is then judged as "bad":
>someone who may be suffering from what I can only really describe as coding addiction, the solution may be to find healthier rewards.
For some people, the healthiest reward is the coding. For others, it's working on solving a 300-year old math problem, or struggling for hours and days to find the perfect word for a line in a poem, or a sentence in a novel. There are no "healthier" rewards than those intellectual gymnastics.
Sometimes it's true that these "addictions" don't perfectly align with business priorities and client demands. Saying that the addiction is "unhealthy" is favoring the perspective of the business. The other perspective is that the individual is in the "wrong" day job.