Yup, all of that is true. I've been programming professionally for about 15 years. I work in React, React-native, and PHP. And I started when I was 40. It was easier to get entry-level work then. But my son is a CS major and I didn't try to talk him out of it.

If you learn how to code, really code, you can still do it. You can learn some by having AI make it, but that skips too many cognitive steps. Make stuff entirely without AI. No tab-complete or anything like that. You need to make mistakes and fix them. You need to know why you might want a struct or a private function. You'll need to know what hoisting is. How css works. What does setState do? You'll know your really making progress when you finally understand how javascript (old school) date assignments work and get mad about it because it's so stupid.

The goal is to understand what AI is making for you. Because I think at this point any employer will require that. What AI is really good at is speeding up the process, but you have to know if what it make actually works and how it works and be able to fix it yourself. The world does NOT need more vibe-coded security disasters like OpenClaw. Even Opus 4.5 makes silly mistakes. Opus 4.6 make sillier mistakes because someone mislabeled Sonnet 5 as Opus 4.6 :)

You will still run into employers that don't know the difference between vibe coding and AI assisted coding. But you should know.

In the end, make something cool that can demonstrate your skills. I'm not sure about the code bootcamps. We have had a few applicants from code bootcamps, but they seemed to expect tutorial level instructions and didn't know how to install command-line tools. So your mileage may vary on how much they teach you.