I believe you, but I think this experience/job varies pretty wildly. That is, there are organizations where your job does involve writing software that's more than short scripts. If a company chooses "best of breed" for their pipelines, for example, there's quite a lot of integration between SCM, build tools, security tools, deployment tools, and so on. Doing that in a way that serves the end users well isn't always trivial.
Reading code, understanding building and deployment are all useful and required to some extent (especially the latter). But specific programming skills are not required any more than that would be for say a technical writer or network engineer.