In a very meta kind of way, this is a great case study in the general way that humans acquire new skills and understanding. Grossly oversimplifying the research that's been done into this, we start with very specific things, and progress towards more general cases as experience and skill grow, until ultimately we (hopefully) reach a level where the fundamentals become intuitive.

Sadly, the next horrible insight a lot of people reach in the context of programming specifically is that while experienced, skillful developers can do everything the newbies can and more, for a great many commercial applications the newbie who has only the specific skills useful for a few months will cost far less than the expert but still produce acceptably good results. This explains a great many things, from the ageism and burn-out that are unfortunately all too common in our industry to the generally poor quality and often short lifetimes of a lot of software that gets shipped.

I'm hoping the next insight after that is how you fix those problems and achieve a step-change in the benefits our whole society derives from software by being able to use the extra skill and experience of the better developers in a viable way, but sadly I have yet to reach that level of enlightenment myself.