Why not, for the same reason that everyone can be - to reasonable standards - be literate?
This is merely a new and powerful form of literacy that has become relevant due to a particular set of technological circumstances, but structurally it's not that different from the printing press preceding widespread literacy of the regular sort.
And no doubt this form of literacy is powerful. It relates to an understanding of how to describe the processing of information in various contexts. In an increasingly information overloaded world, the ability to use the tool of your time to process the information you need will become a critical ability.
I think one fallacy we can implicitly succumb to is the notion that "everybody knowing how to program" somehow relates to everyone being a programmer.
Everyone knowing how to read and write doesn't mean everyone is an author or a technical writer. But everyone _does_ use their ability to read and write to make their own work more productive within their contexts. And even in a personal context, being able to read an ingredients list, or write a shopping list, is underpinned by literacy.
What's so hard to imagine about a future where everyone knows how to build small useful programs for themselves, and just as everyone has access to post it notes and notepads, everyone having access to a few small devices that allow them to use that literacy to build programs that are useful to them in their day to day activities?
It's hard to imagine the specifics of how that might be applied, but it seems easy to imagine the transformative power of that sort of a casual power being not just available to the masses, but understood and able to be exercised by all of them.
Not everyone can become literate. Very roughly 0.1% of people lack the mental ability to read, even given lots of training. Flipping your argument around, it's totally possible that programming is that much more difficult than reading that 0.1% of the population isn't unable, but more like 10%.
Most coding problems are wiring stuff up. If you can change a tire or put together a LEGO set, you can probably write code.
The problem with the golden geese that you're pointing out is mostly one of tooling, in my opinion. Undergrads at top CS programs are as clueless as your grandmother about developing software because the tools are either toys for children or extremely sharp knives with a blade on the handle. This is a problem that replit is trying to solve.
Frankly, a lot of people who currently write code are only writing code because they stumbled across the right combination of tools: reducing the barrier to entry will only improve things.
I never used any tools like Replit when I was learning to code.
Likewise I'm pretty good but I can't code in Assembly
Minecraft, for example, opened a door to system thinking to a lot of young people, but there's probably many more that just like the fun and not the understanding and craft, so maybe those people's brain already leaned towards it?
Right now we're in peak "Everyone should know how to code" but sometimes it seems like we keep chasing the golden goose - Visual Basic, Dreamweaver, Node based programming, Webflow etc.
Edit: forgot to add that the CEO has that confident delusional/visionary vibe so this certainly fits the bill. Time will tell which it is.