See here for an overview of the current thinking on junk DNA: https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/Functions-of-Junk-DNA.aspx
Basically there are a variety of indicators that suggest A - Many "junk" regions are in some way evolutionarily important because many sections of "junk" are preserved across time, which, given the way DNA works, would almost certainly not be the case if they had no function, B - there is evidence non-coding regions actually do influence when and how other genes are expressed.
In essence, you could look at it as possibly metadata or maybe something very loosely along the lines of a Makefile for genetic code.
I think the assertion that it's not "junk" is more alluding to the fact that although it does not directly encode proteins, asserting that non-coding proteins are "junk" requires us to ignore that there is clear evidence that non-coding regions likely do serve other purposes, or rather, requires us to proactively assert they serve no purpose simply because they don't serve the very first purpose we hypothesized they should serve.