I can personally attest to this point of view. My degree is in protein structure, specifically x-ray crystallography, and there were more than a few professors in our department who would specifically deride any post-doc/senior-fellow who "got lost in the technology". By which they meant focusing on writing software instead of writing publications/grants.

At that level it's a brutal time/return calculation, like allowing a long trained neurosurgeon to do any of their own paper work. Far more profitable to have them constantly in surgery.

So it was: "fix that three lines of FORTRAN to change the output for 'table #17' and get back to the bench!" (egads i saw some horrific code)

One problem is that to measure a scientist's output, one typically uses their citation count, and people tend to not cite software (there are exceptions), and software based on other software does not transitively pass on those citations.

5 of the top 10 most highly cited articles of the past 5 years in biomedicine are software programs: https://pubrank.carbocation.com/article?y=2012

And if you go back 10 years, 9 of the top 10 articles are software programs: https://pubrank.carbocation.com/article?y=2007