Depends where you start from, really. If you come from the "bare metal" side of things (electronic work, microcontrollers etc...) then work your way "up" then the memory model is all you think about. I learned pretty much that way so I never really had much of an issue understanding these concepts (conversely, it took me a while to get used to things like dynamic typing).

That being said nowadays I'm sure many more coders start with something like Javascript instead of 8bit controllers, so I'm sure these types of articles are very valuable to many.