Not OP but people though that GenZ would be great at using computers because they were born in it. Turns out they suck at using computers even way more than boomers because they are used to the curated interface of smartphones and can't solve any sort of problem on their own.
If one looks at the chronology of programmers you can see a sort of parallel
> whitebeards: programming was assembly on big iron. these guys understand computers at the lowest level and can code down to the punchcard
>graybeards: programming was C/C++/pascal/vanilla javascript/html etc these guys sometimes know assembly but do generally understand memory, stacks, heaps, and can write optimized code
>brownbeard: programming is python, react.js or similar. grew up in times of cycles-a-plenty, so never learned as much about optimization (nor, never really needed to)
what we see throughout is a russian doll of abstractions. and 99.99% of the time it works great these abstractions, everything is faster and easier and what's underneath doesn't really matter. the debatable point is that 0.01% of the time where "under the hood" can be useful, sometimes tremendously useful.
If we're talking about execution hours for common apps, that stat might be close to real.
If we're talking about engineering effort to create performant, deployable apps and systems, it may be different.
There are a significant number of difficult software systems that require complete knowledge of what's going on 'under the hood'. Think, runtime for all those wonderful abstractions. Libraries to port huge systems to different hardware and operating systems.
The large datacenter infrastructure that supports all the magic.
Those things are an entirely different universe than 'put up a webpage' or 'auto-generate a schema' or whatever.
