There are two main problems with that thought. First is that, more often than not, lack of interest is used as an excuse to imply lack of skill. Which is why I used to wording "aiming towards". And second, falsely attributing lack of interest in itself can be considered offensive to many people. Maybe you wouldn't think it's offensive yourself, but it's clear many people do. On the very least, it's discriminating.

To make both points a bit more clear. Imagine that if I told you, that "it's not that I think you're bad at coding. But I just think that you're not interested in hard problems. You rather solve easy ones instead." I'm not (directly) attacking your skills, I'm just falsely discriminating your interests. But hopefully you can understand why this sentence would sound offensive to many people.

I can see how someone might take offense, but at the same time accurate statements aren't always palatable.

I'm not sure your comparison is completely fair - you make it purely about deep technical problems vs 'easy' technical problems. My experience when I was a CS grad student was that the women there were interested in very difficult, important problems (particularly UX, for example), but weren't generally fascinated by, say, fundamental data structures research. Obviously there's notable counterexamples, and I am speaking in generalisations.

The reason I distance myself from the comment that sparked this discussion is not that I think it's wrong with respect to what men/women are, on average, interested in (it's hard to argue with basic statistics), but because I have no idea whether that's purely because of cultural influences or it's something more fundamental as well.