You're obviously not very familiar with web development. The one who you have in mind is called designer. He's as you say, although it's still very hard and important job.

Web developers are programming all day long. They use JS almost exclusively with occasional excursions to HTML-land, without (in principle) ever touching CSS.

I'm a backend developer, so you will probably agree that I'm a programmer and I know what programming is. Just last week I had to fix/rewrite something on a frontend. It was a routine which retried an AJAX request until it either succeeded or failed a given amount of times, but with a twist - it cycled through a list of URLs while retrying. That's a very simple problem, I know, but I really felt as if I was programming while doing this - don't tell me I wasn't. And given JavaScript peculiarities it was full of surprises and overall a rather pleasant experience.

Now, design and programming are really two different skillsets. One is clearly programming, another is maybe-somewhat-with-HTML5-and-CSS3-almost-programming. You're confusing them both into one and so your conclusions are equally confused. To summarize: I know too little about design to really argue, but web development is, of course, programming.