A more apt analogy would be "for everyday users who just want to record their expenses, keep a journal, and sketch some drawings, paper and pencil have been perfectly fine for the last century".

Understanding how computers work down to being able to describe L1 instruction caches and how prefetching works and why having an 8 instruction wide decoder pulling from a giant L1I cache isn't really relevant to empowering people. Most people are going to be more empowered by using computers more efficiently to prepare documents and presentations to assist their other endeavors. I think those people can be forgiven for not getting excited that now they have "8 cores" or "16 cores" or "32 cores". Conversely, getting drastically improved battery life is an immediate and tangible improvement in the day-to-day lives of people.

Being illiterate creates a societal gap because it prevents the free spread of information, and creates a class hierarchy centered around controlling the spread of information. How does not understanding how computers work limit people?

  > "how much of a divide there now is"

You seem to be insinuating that, used to, people were "more literate" and are becoming more ignorant. What if it's just that computers have become easier to use and more prevalent?

More people are using computers to communicate now than ever before. This seems to be the opposite of "peasants not knowing how to write". People have more opportunity to reach out and grow.

There are problems in controlling information and infrastructure, who owns all our data, and who controls social media along with privacy concerns, and maybe one of the solutions to these problems is more tech education, but this seems orthogonal to your concerns.