I think you misunderstand, I'm talking about a programmer who makes perfect, bug-free code in one shot. There are no bugs to catch and fix, because this "perfect" programmer never writes buggy code.
The moral of the sayings is, that "perfect" programmer is actually a bad programmer because he wouldn't know how to fix bugs by virtue of never needing to deal with them.
To reuse the driver analogy, the driver who never misses a turn is a bad driver because he doesn't know what to do when he does miss a turn.
If a software developer consistently delivers high-quality software on time and on budget, that means they're good at their job, pretty much by definition. It would make no sense to infer they're bad at fixing bugs.
It would make sense to infer instead that they're good at catching and fixing bugs prior to release, which is what we want from a software development process.
> the driver who never misses a turn is a bad driver because he doesn't know what to do when he does miss a turn
Missing a turn during a driving test will never improve your odds of passing.
The driver who never misses a turn presumably has excellent awareness and will be well equipped to deal with a mistake should they make one. They also probably got that way by missing plenty of turns when they were less experienced.
What we are discussing isn't a real programmer we might actually find. No, we are talking about a hypothetical "perfect" programmer. This "perfect" programmer never wrote a bug in his entire life right from the moment he was born, he never had a "when they were less experienced" phase.
Obviously, that means this "perfect" programmer also never debugged anything. For all the perfect code he writes, that makes him worse than a programmer who writes buggy code but also knows how to go about debugging them.
The doesn't know how to fix bugs idea seems pretty silly.