I have absolutely not said that if you learn how to read a score you’re not a musician. I compared learning to play an instrument by first learning to read a score to learning to program by first learning to type in a program accurately from a magazine. The similarity is that you’re trying to learn something that, while hard to master, can very quickly be fun and creative, but first you decided to learn to do a different thing that is just as hard and very tedious and only tangentially relevant. For a lot of learners, it’s likely to be a turn-off, or a distraction.

Concert pianist are not beginners, and they have chosen to focus on the type of repertoire that is completely centered around sheet music, so they are way, way outside where this analogy makes sense.