This is definitely true of my father. When he was young owning a car meant working on cars, especially for a teenager who couldn't afford to take it to the shop every couple of weeks.

Cars are so reliable and take so little maintenance nowadays, he marvels at them. OTOH they're also very unfriendly to the shade-tree mechanic. The engines are covered by plastic cowling panels. Everything is packed in so tightly it's a nightmare to change anything. And it's all controlled by proprietary black-box computer systems.

This in a very apt analogy. Listening to stories from my dad of his early vehicles makes me both jealous and grateful. He was forced to learn how to do all kinds of component repairs and be prepared to do them on long road trips because cars would just occasionally break down. I'm jealous in that I was never forced to pick up all of the hands-on mechanical skills but I'm grateful that I don't actually have to realistically worry about constantly repairing my car to have transportation.

I was thinking exactly the same analogy.

I think people are overreacting to simple facts of life: if a technology is mature and the services around it plenty and cheap, there's no point wasting your time learning the ins and outs of it.

I don't see what the problem is if someone doesn't know how to add a RAM stick just because I do, the same way I don't feel compelled to know how to replace a light bulb to save myself a tenner