I think I'm in your camp. When you're a programmer, there's a lot of things you rely on that have been done by someone else and you don't really understand, neatly packaged.

There's not much point in teaching specific things, because there are thousands of specific things that make a program work. Yesterday my code failed because the whitelist at the server was checking my ipv6 address instead of the ipv4 on the website interface. The day before I was stumped on a Rust borrow checker thing.

You end up learning the things that you run into. If you've never needed compiler flags, it's actually not that easy to learn without a motivation. Same goes with memory barriers, garbage collection, and so on.

There's just so many rabbit holes. Telling people they need to know this or that is futile, what they need to know is how to figure out whatever their issue is. Some common tools with some common comments about pros and cons, warnings about where the caves are and what's more trivial than it looks.

My wife is starting a CS degree, and I'll be looking over her shoulder providing this kind of advice, rather than recommending anything in particular.