It is not about when you started learning something, but how you learned it.
It can be easy to learn the "wrong way" to do things when not classically trained, especially in engineering roles, that is hard to unlearn later.
That is, you could have an understanding of something that works for what you have seen so far, but is fundamentally flawed and it is not until much later when you have seem more complicated scenarios that you understand how it was flawed.
Someone learning later, though, from a professional, can be showed the bigger picture earlier and have a better understanding.
For me, the biggest question, is what company does the person asking this interview question work for, so I can know to never interview with them ever.
This is a horrible question that if not illegal, is extremely close to being illegal since it requires the candidate to give information about their age.
The signal this question provides is a signal about the person giving the interview (and the company as a whole) and nothing about the candidate.
That is, if someone asked me this question in an interview, I would immediately know that I want nothing to do with the company. I would probably politely end the interview on the spot, and would definitely not answer the question.
What the question is asking is whether the candidate was able to have access to a computer as well as resources on how to develop on that computer when you were growing up.
This is extremely biased because many people may not have been able to have a computer to program on, could not get access to such a computer, or, if they could, did not have access to information on how to program the computer.
The point is, all of those details are irrelevant.
That is, if two candidates have the same number of years of professional experience, it doesn't matter when they first started getting interested in the field they are interviewing for.
However, it looks like only select users are granted access and access is given in batches (see https://community.openai.com/t/usage-tier-3-access-denied-to...). Just something to consider.