Eh, way back in 1991 we had things like Visual Basic with drag-and-drop GUI creation. You could easily do things like display bitmaps on screen without ever having created an array or used variable types other than 'variant'.
The tool to use for hobby game dev back then was Turbo Pascal on DOS.
Can they though? Especially if there are several developers working on it. Or are you saying that once they start using frameworks they are no longer ‘good’ developers?
This would actually be a benefit for younger developers that could bypass it except that once the problem gets bad enough it seeps through to training materials across the web and self-taught people cop it as collateral. If you try and google up some advice for how to get started with a web app these days you're going to get all sorts of opinions on what sort of "stack" you should start with to the point that people make it a part of their ideology, like you get some sort of fucking street cred for using ts-pattern or whatever this week's designated architectural microfad is.
The fad these days is to skip learning how to program and instead just learn how to subsist in an ecosystem 'real' programmers have built for you.
You don't need to know how to write a game engine, you just have to download the right assets from the Unity Store.
What does 'state' mean? That's that thing in React right?
Tree? Graph? Never heard of them, do you mean a component?
Difference between a class and a struct? Well I've never heard of a struct but classes are the best thing since sliced bread because you can use them to do a ObservableFactoryControllerFactory and I read in a Medium article that those are good.
The net result of all this is that the code that actually drives everything is being written by older people that got the chance to actually learn, while all the learning opportunities are being stolen from the next generation in the name of getting people "productive" on day 1 (at the expense of the rest of the days of their career).
Those anecdotes you find 10 of in every thread on HN where someone copied a BASIC script out of a book or whatever you boomers did, the modern equivalent of that is npm installing some shit, building 10x the amount of stuff and learning 0.1x as much.