Agree after that period where you stopped needing to manually install drivers and configure things I'm sure tech literacy dropped off - there is no reason to know how your technology works these days (to survive) unless you like tinkering. I am sure it is the same in other technological areas too - I grew up fixing the family cars and now it seems every minor problem goes to the garage. I think black boxes are just the norm now - I'm guessing there are large portions, both young and old, of the population who don't use the internet outside of a smartphone or tablet which they use until it breaks or slows down and replace with another magical app machine. No understanding of tech required.

I've only noticed the use of WiFi to mean Internet pretty recently. Its thoroughly confusing when you are trying to trouble shoot WiFi problems for someone and you realise their WiFi is working fine - their ISP just has an outage. I'd say this is a modern problem but I remember people calling the computer tower the CPU for as long as I can remember.