I'm pretty sure the whole crux of the issue is simply that game development still relies heavily on programming for the implementation aspect, but the design aspect is what drives most newbs into game development. So all of these guys who have no chops for programming end up getting into game design and spend years twiddling around with designs they can never really realize properly just because they don't know anything about programming and have no interest in learning.

So, why don't many of these newbs ever actually have the drive or chops for programming? For me the answer is simple: because everybody's different, duh. It doesn't matter that programming is "easy". They'll never learn it, just like I will probably never learn painting even though Bob Ross tells me painting is the easiest thing in the world every time he comes on television. And because I consider myself an artistic type I grant to him that it's beautiful and I'm sure I'd enjoy doing it if I knew how, but ultimately it's just not my thing and that's all there is to it.

Some people believe that game design might become wholly separate from programming someday, so that no matter how elaborate the design is, you can rely on not having to program and still end up with a great, unique project at the end, but I'm very skeptical about that. The very fact that games run on computers means that programmers will always be involved in their development in some way, even if software like Unity and Unreal marginalizes their involvement for indies somewhat.

Also, this is a totally minor note, but as incompetent as notch is, he's still WAY more competent than many other successful indie devs out there. Take the guy who made that Five Nights at Freddy's series: every one of those games was made using some software called Multimedia Fusion, which is like Gamemaker except it doesn't even give you the option of using a scripting language (ergo it is ALL visual). But this kind of thing has been the case forever. Surely some of you remember the original Myst? That game was the best-selling PC game of all time until the Sims in the late 90s, and it was built using Hypercard, which was literally a no-code solution for creating interactive slideshows on the Apple Macintosh. Crazy, but it worked. And it meant that they didn't have to program anything.