For most of the article the author seems to be discussing non-professional programmers rather than non-programmers. Or perhaps using the two interchangeably?
There is certainly a need for non-professional programmers to be able to program (e.g. in the sciences). For non-programmers, programming a task via GUIs have been effective, although admittedly in the worst case they can devolve into a mess of check boxes, drop downs and spinners.
EDIT: Of course in a business you'd hire professionals for a job (or outsource it). That's just good sense for anything your business relies on.
I'm not sure about what the article is specifically referring to, but end-user programming refers to a spectrum of people that need to accomplish a programming-like task without being a professional developer.
The paper "The state of the art in end-user software engineering" discusses this spectrum from an email user to a middle school child to a scientist: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1922658
There is certainly a need for non-professional programmers to be able to program (e.g. in the sciences). For non-programmers, programming a task via GUIs have been effective, although admittedly in the worst case they can devolve into a mess of check boxes, drop downs and spinners.
EDIT: Of course in a business you'd hire professionals for a job (or outsource it). That's just good sense for anything your business relies on.