Yes: Programmers who start at twelve are often the 10x programmers who can really program faster than the average developer by a lot.
No: It's not because they have 10 more years of experience. Read "The Mythical Man Month." That's the book that popularized the concept that some developers were 5-25x faster than others. One of the takeaways was that the speed of a developer was not correlated with experience. At all.
That said, the kind of person who can learn programming at 12 might just be the kind of person who is really good at programming.
I started learning programming concepts at 11-12. I'm not the best programmer I know, but when I started out in the industry at 22 I was working with developers with 10+ years of (real) experience on me...and I was able to come in and improve on their code to an extreme degree. I was completing my projects faster than other senior developers. With less than two years of experience in the industry I was promoted to "senior" developer and put on a project as lead (and sole) developer and my project was the only one to be completed on time, and with no defects. (This is video game industry, so it wasn't exactly a super-simple project; at the time this meant games written 100% in assembly language with all kinds of memory and performance constraints, and a single bug meant Nintendo would reject the image and make you fix the problem. We got our cartridge approved the first time through.)
Some programmers are just faster and more intuitive with programming than others. This shouldn't be a surprise. Some writers are better and faster than others. Some artists are better and faster than others. Some architects are better and faster than others. Some product designers are better and faster than others. It's not all about the number of hours of practice in any of these cases; yes, the best in a field often practices an insane amount. But the very top in each field, despite having similar numbers of hours of practice and experience, can vary in skill by an insane amount. Even some of the best in each field are vastly different in speed: You can have an artist who takes years to paint a single painting, and another who does several per week, but of similar ultimate quality. Humans have different aptitudes. This shouldn't even be controversial.
I do wonder if the "learned programming at 12" has anything to do with it: Most people will only ever be able to speak a language as fluently as a native speaker if they learn it before they're about 13-14 years old. After that the brain (again, for most people; this isn't universal) apparently becomes less flexible. In MRI studies they can actually detect differences between the parts of the brain used to learn a foreign language as an adult vs. as a tween or early teen. So there's a chance that early exposure to the right concepts actually reshapes the brain. But that's just conjecture mixed with my intuition of the situation: When I observe "normal" developers program, it really feels like I'm a native speaker and they're trying to convert between an alien way of thinking about a problem into a foreign language they're not that familiar with.
AND...there may not be a need to explicitly PROGRAM before you're 15 to be good at it as an adult. There are video games that exercise similar brain regions that could substitute for actual programming experience. AND I may be 100% wrong. Would be good for someone to fund some studies.