That said, I do agree with you. I think that 1) it can be be very important to make distinctions between types of programmers, because 2) it makes it easier to actively explore the field and finding what suits your 'type'.
For example, for many people, someone who 'does' HTML/CSS with some jQuery plugins, is a programmer. But personally I'd not really call such a person a programmer. I don't mean that as a value judgment, but rather to make a distinction between 'types' of work.
Making that distinction earlier in my career could've helped me (whether the label it programmer/non-programmer is used or not), because I spent more time than I'd have liked being such a HTML/CSS/JS guy. I learned tons of very specific rules/tricks/lore that were necessary, but did not help as a programmer, and spent countless hours doing this kind of work, not really enjoying it all that much.
It was only when I started doing 'proper' javascript stuff that I realized how much fun programming is, and how my relative enjoyment of the whole front-end stuff depended on the bits of 'real programming' I would occasionally get to do. In hindsight I wish I'd figured that out earlier, and not spent so many brain cycles and storage on CSS layout tricks and discussing how much 'semantic HTML' matters.
(thankfully those things are still useful when I do full-stack type stuff, but still)
Ironically, I do the precisely opposite, due to my personal experiences. Over the years I lived on this planet, I've been both in the "elitist" groups and the groups that accuse someone else of being "elitist" - and I universally found it that it's the "elitist" group that was always right. I've learned to recognize accusations of elitism as ways to cater to one's feelings of insecurity (and I was guilty of that in the past, too).
Yes, I think this is very much underappreciated. When people find a language or system that matches their way of thinking, it works a lot better for them. But not necessarily for the next person. So you get small communities of people who find that e.g. Lisp has been amazing for them, who can't see that other people think differently about programs and systems.
You are correct - however, it doesn't mean that this statement is necessarily wrong.
Usually when I see a statement that reeks of elitism, I immediately assume lower probability of it being true, because elitism of a statement correlates with falsehood - but it's worth remembering that this correlation is not absolute, and sometimes (although rare), elitism is indeed deserved and true. And in this particular case, out of my personal professional experience, elitism is absolutely deserved. There are a lots and lots of software engineers out there that can't or just won't fit more complex ideas into their minds.
And yet, you are of course, correct: these developers can, and will, do good work. They can have different skills, like knowing the users, or creating beautiful animations, or having a great game design sense. These developers don't need to be looked down upon. And yet it would be very useful for all of us to acknowledge that these developers think in a different way and require different tools - they're not "worse" than "real" engineers, but they are different.