The third sentence of the article says "...75,000 entry-level jobs require Python proficiency." They're not expecting to hire Guido to those jobs, but someone who knows which side of the keyboard should be on top would be a good start.

Given two candidates, one who went to a training exercise and earned a certificate for it and one who has a Github page that includes a couple disgusting, hacky, buggy Python scripts (mostly consisting of snippets copied from StackOverflow) to automate some analysis that was awkward in Excel, I'd take the latter 99 times out of 100.