The article title is false (deliberately clickbait). He clearly learned to program at an early age which is what he was doing when making those RPGs. Programming with BASIC does train on core programming skills and concepts.
He just stopped doing it and got stuck for a bit while trying to pick it up again with a different language many years later.
I agree that it's not a clear-cut case, but programming is so much more than doing ifs and gotos. It seems that he learned most of his programming at 40 still. I did some programming with Turbo Pascal 3, but I hardly knew how to program, actually. I skipped all the hard parts (pointers, even the simplest data structures, refactoring general-purpose code into functions, using 3rd party libraries etc.) when I was a kid. There are more than one senses what it means to "know programming", I think me and the author knew as kids in one sense but not in another sense.
The point at which the author actually "gets" programming and felt comfortable with the idea that given a task they could write something to solve it appears to be when the author determines their real start with programming.
I'm not sure it makes sense to really get into the debate of what constitutes programming as like a lot of skills there's a strong personal aspect to when you actually have some skill in it. Many people are this way with cooking, singing, or other creative/practical endeavors, and I see it similarly with programming. Personally I think the drive to get people to coding is a bit too generous and supportive in the wrong way, for example, promoting that Excel users are programmers/DBAs because Excel is essential a database with a well documented UI. There is definitely truth to such a statement and the intention is good and comes from a place of support; however I would wager most Excel wizards without coding/DB knowledge would not feel comfortable or a desire to step further since they personally don't get the connection and can't conceptualize how to translate those skills into what they consider programming.
I had a very similar programming history to the author -- as a child I could write very simple programs in BASIC (needed something to do during study-hall on my TI-89) and also had spent a lot of time following guides to hack trial programs on MacOS to extend the trial period on games/programs indefinitely. I could put together a basic website to share ROMs with my friends, but I absolutely could not figure out anything I thought was 'complex', and thus I didn't 'get' programming in my mind.
It wasn't until my late 20's when at a tech support job, I got absolutely fed up with a specific type of case that required a lot of specific hardware information from client servers which my colleagues and our clients never collected correctly; the cases were simple if you had all the information, but after multiple attempts to get the information, both the support team/client would be frustrated and the case would needlessly get escalated to me. After dealing with a particularly abrasive client on a case like this, I finally said "enough is enough" and that night rage-coded a very simple tool to ensure all the system info was collected with the click of a button; my frustration fueled me through all the bumps and pitfalls of getting this info and voila, 12 hours later I had written what I consider my first program. Months later, I even solved my first bug in it all on my own, and that's when I considered myself legit. After that, I couldn't stop myself from finding nails to smash with my new hammer, programming.
It's all about when you 'get' that moment and feel like given a task you can actually figure it out. That one moment that lets you realize "you can do this, given enough time."
He just stopped doing it and got stuck for a bit while trying to pick it up again with a different language many years later.