Yes, I agree with you, Excel formulas are absolutely programming. And yes, I agree, these are skills that can be taught.

But not that many people write Excel formulas. Up to 50% of people in the West don't have basic numeracy skills enough to do what you describe.

I would say that you're beginning to program when you write something that iterates or recurses. With a clear terminating condition: not merely spreadsheet formulas that contain a cyclic reference whereby you iterate until some numbers appear to stabilize.

In my mind, the recognition of repeated structures in a spreadsheet count as beginning of programming. This sort of thing: "if I create this pattern of cell references and then repeat it across the grid arbitrarily far, such and such a result/behavior will emerge". It is like recursion unfolded, and on the verge of being codified compactly.

Not only that, but Excel is the worlds most popular functional programming language.

In the context of 10x, I think we are talking about programmers that can begin to program _professionally_ vs. bike riding as a hobby.

And back in the day in the UK our CSE class at 13/14 had no difficulty learning programming and that was an assembly language with only Add sub and some jump instructions

For context the UK used to have CSE and O Level Exams at 16 the CSE ones where for the vocational track kids who would leave school at 16.