This is a very nuanced statement and depends highly on region.

When you hear "programmers are in high demand" it actually means "senior/experienced programmers in the company's stack who can quickly solve the issues piling up on their desk, are in high demand".

Juniors or devs with near zero experience in that particular stack are getting rejection letters as most companies never consider on how transferrable dev skills are and prefer to wait until the perfect dev shows up, instead of giving someone new to the stack a few weeks to ramp up.

At least that's how it is in my current country of Austria, but back in Eastern Europe, the demand for devs is so high due to US off-shoring and Western EU near-shoring, that companies will hire absolutely anyone who can write a for loop and even give them trainings to ramp them up quicker. It's literally impossible to be unemployed there even as an inexperienced slow learning coder. Sure you won't make six figure salaries, but you'll live far more comfortably than 90% of the population.

IMO, just like in dating and real-estate, the dev jobs market is very much about "location, location, location".