I think it's need. There's plenty of chairwarmers hired as senior managers in my place of employment. The company would be doing radically better if these people were genuinely talented and dedicated, but apparently it was too hard to hire such folks, so we got those impostors instead. The whole department is a mess as a result. And it's mostly the same across the whole org. The world just doesn't have that many talented and dedicated people, and also a lot of them decide to just launch their own businesses instead of being a part of some corporate charade.
> Besides basic problem solving ability that all humans have and a background with experiences that qualify you for the job there's nothing special about it.
Are you aware of basic problem solving abilities of average human? They're... not that great. Intelligence plays a key role in constructing good ad-hoc working theories as to the hidden/internal state of the mess you're currently working with. Smart people are just better/faster at it and the more complex the problem is (and we're working with problems of huge complexity - often with codebases that are to large to understand within a lifetime), the more important that becomes. Not to mention that there's plenty of people who just don't tolerate (emotionally) uncertainty too well, and they feel terrible at jobs like ours, preferring to be a supermarket clerk or doing something else with minimum uncertainty, exploration and decision-making. For example, my mother once worked with a woman who has severely stressed over having to learn to operate a new kind of cash register (and she was a clerk at a store). Imagine how well would she do in the world of front-end development...
Need or want?
We've spent 30yr trying very hard to remove individual judgement and responsibility from the corporate world. Most employers larger than say ~75 people likely have enough process built up that they can skate by on people who mindlessly follow process with a few talented people sprinkled about to spice things up.
>while the truth is, most people are just not talented enough to be employed into demanding and well-paying office positions that most of us here work in.
The hardest part about working as a programmer is getting your first job as a programmer which usually means suffering through Calc 3 you'll never think very hard about again. Getting a pay stub is on FAANG letterhead doesn't automatically equate with intelligence though many here may keep telling themselves that. The bulk of the SWEs and SREs in those companies are just going through the motions and reacting to situations as any other person operating under the same constraints would. Besides basic problem solving ability that all humans have and a background with experiences that qualify you for the job there's nothing special about it.