"Ridiculous" was a joke, taking the fantastical claims about FORTRAN as true (thus it's "ridiculous" to imagine the problem going away in a decade when it has already been solved for over 60 years).

I first saw this claim 20 years after that (in the late 70s) and have seen it pretty regularly since.

FORTRAN did expand the set of people able to write code, but it still required as much rigor as before. And the claim has always been true in trivial cases: famously secretaries who "couldn't program" were writing Emacs macros at MIT in the 70s. Visicalc and now Excel allow people who don't believe they can program to write reasonably complex programs, but it quickly becomes unmanageable, undebuggable spaghetti.

IDEs have long been touted as programming-eliminators, but the code they generate has always been brittle and limited, and in the end...can do only trivial things.

Sure, at some point many scriptable or programmable objects may be composable by people without training, but we will need human programmers until machines themselves are at least as smart as humans.