Interesting, maybe there's a cultural aspect to it, here in France it's frankly not that common in my experience. Maybe it's because of the way it's taught (or not taught) at school, maybe it's because AZERTY is a garbage layout, maybe my sample is heavily biased somehow...

I'm French, and touch typing my Bépo keyboard.

I have to concur. Many programmers don't know how to type. Possibly most. Also, whenever I bring the layout up, the most common objection is that it's impossible because they could be touching computers that aren't their own, as if every programmer would be a system administrator as well…

I have yet to be forced into Azerty or Qwerty… except when playing TellTale games. Apparently they have found the One True Layout, and it is Qwerty.

I'm french and did stop looking as much at my keyboard when I switched to QWERTY. Mainly because of non-alphanumeric characters in a programming context. the ` or [] or {} are terrible to access with AZERTY

There's a difference between typing without looking and proper touch-typing. The latter optimises for hitting most keys while moving your fingers the least distance from the home row. It's pretty much how a keyboard is designed to be used. I was able to type without looking long before I taught myself to touch-type and I can confidently say that proper touch-typing was a vast improvement over my ad-hoc learned finger placement.