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It happens a lot more than you'd think. Programming continues to be big money even if you're awful at it. To give a lousy comparison, imagine a story with a really lousy wizard; they can mess up/fail most of the time, but as long as a few times a year they make some pretty lights and woo their audience, probably they'll stay in favor, since it's still magic to everyone else. The failures likely are written off as "well it just happens like that sometimes."

The big issue is that even if new programmers understand the basics of programming and how to get a functional program, the discipline of identifying when the problem you're dealing which actually has well defined business rules is another craft altogether.

Blank Page Anxiety is just as real for code I suppose as it is for other types of writing, and having a system with structured "write something that does X Y Z" is often essential for a lot of people as it's the only way they know how to produce code.

As an example, we sometimes take in fresh from University trainees for some general datacenter/IT work who come from compsci/bootcamps, and they always say they want to develop this skillset more, but never write a single line of code (we stress heavily that this would be paid work you get time set aside for; usually no takers).

I'm not a programmer by trade, but I am very lazy and have gotten pretty good at figuring out when spending a week to write some tooling is less time than the total time over a year I would spend on a common task and write tooling accordingly.

Finding problem and developing a solution is not a skill that is out there by default, but it is fairly easy to learn. I like technical problems and hearing about them because it's fun to think about, and once some basic code got into my skillset, it was an additional solution to many of these problems. Listening to people describe their challenges is a great source of projects to practice on. The satisfaction of someone telling me "wow, you have no idea how much time this saves me every week" is a pretty good inspiration to keep learning and doing more; it's "production code" and the benefit is immediately apparent.

I never go out seeking a problem to code a solution for, but instead just like talking about technical things. Inevitably, a problem comes up that I think "how hard could that be to write a program for?" and a new project is born. (Sometimes the answer turns out to be "very hard", but those are really fun projects once I'm past the frustration :) )