Abstraction is a huge factor in this too. Language may be dominant because we are at a stage in which the vast majority of programming is little more than hooking together tidy abstractions that are already highly optimized and predominantly organized linguistically.
It you ever need to get into the guts of a system or need to solve bleeding edge problems for which good abstractions don't yet exist, the "math brain" becomes significantly more relevant.
I say this as someone who studied literature and philosophy. The majority of what I know about programming and software engineering I either taught myself or learned from the tutelage of others on the job. Early on in my career, a solid mathematics background was, indeed, not that relevant. These days, though, I'd be lost without it. Whether you like it or not, when it comes to doing real engineering you necessarily need to establish bounds and prove things about those bounds and typically you'll need to do this numerically or at the very least using inductive structures. Linguistic aptitude is still relevant, but it helps less in these cases.
It you ever need to get into the guts of a system or need to solve bleeding edge problems for which good abstractions don't yet exist, the "math brain" becomes significantly more relevant.
I say this as someone who studied literature and philosophy. The majority of what I know about programming and software engineering I either taught myself or learned from the tutelage of others on the job. Early on in my career, a solid mathematics background was, indeed, not that relevant. These days, though, I'd be lost without it. Whether you like it or not, when it comes to doing real engineering you necessarily need to establish bounds and prove things about those bounds and typically you'll need to do this numerically or at the very least using inductive structures. Linguistic aptitude is still relevant, but it helps less in these cases.