Any teacher of a low level CS course knows this is completely untrue. In my CS 101 course our problems were relatively straightforward and short, and lots of people struggled mightily to the point of dropping the course. IMO coding requires a particular way of thinking that a large subset of people just aren't good at, and as someone whose done tons of screening interviews at college recruiting fairs where I give relatively easy problems and ask someone to code a solution, I will tell you the idea that anyone can do it is just false.
In it's original context, it's very clear what "Code was never the hard part" was referring to, that of all the steps of product development (ideation, requirements, design, implementation (coding), deployment, operations, maint, etc.), that code was not the hard part. That's the meaning we should be discussing, and I agree with the author, I believe coding very much was the hard part. Since Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat were recently in the news, I recall some stories about them fixing issues with the search index in the early days of Google where there were random bit flips that were causing the index to be corrupted, and they fixed it and coded a durable solution. This is very much just a code-specific problem that very, very few other people would have been able to solve.