Yes, under appreciation of front-end skills is a real problem. No, that doesn't mean HTML or CSS are programming languages. You aren't "programming the presentation logic", you're configuring the browser.
Under-appreciation of frontend skills in action. Do you think of "presentation logic" as an oxymoron?
I think many people can't see HTML, CSS and even SQL of backend land as programming languages, because they don't think declarative Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) count, don't think of their specificity and limitations as design strengths, and because each one is super easy learn to start but the rest of the enormous iceberg is so often ignored.
That being said, to my knowledge front-end developers generally are JavaScript programmers. I consider front-end developers to be programmers.
Yes. CSS is, simply, objectively, not a programming language. It is not for writing programs.
That doesn't mean it isn't worth developing expertise in. Lots of technical subject matters are not programming languages.
> Surely it’s a coincidence the first group tends to be more male than the second.
I'm starting to suspect that what the author perceives is more about how seriously people take the author, rather than how seriously people take front-end development.