Moreover, even if one does have the discipline to start at the beginning, the foundational courses are filled with material that doesn’t seem relevant to the area you’re actually interested in, so it’s even harder to stay disciplined and learn those topics, too.

Yes! When I was analyzing the various things I would need to learn if I were to ever be able to call myself a programmer, I was somewhat dismayed to realize that the manual skill of typing was not just on the critical path, but at the start.

In later years, as an instructor, the single biggest challenge I had was convincing students (and staff and administration!) that failure to master the keyboard would be forever an obstacle to their development. (There are now voice systems like cursorless that almost completely eliminate the keyboard, but that wasn’t the case then.)