I'm not really so worried about this knowledge transfer thing. I think programming knowledge is being transferred just fine. It's hard to see it, though, because there are several orders of magnitude more programmers now than there were 20 years ago. You don't need a constant X% of programmers to know how to build a game engine. You just need a couple hundred of them, or so, and as long as that knowledge is passed to a couple hundred of the next generation of programmers, that's fine. And if only a couple hundred -- or even a thousand -- programmers know how to build a game engine, it's easy to see how it might feel hard to find those people among the millions of programmers out there. But they're there, and they're mostly probably doing useful work and are propagating their knowledge appropriately.

I also think that many many many more people know how to write efficient programs than Blow or other doomsayers might fear. It's just that most of us have better things to do than micro-optimize or write our own engines or toolkits or whatever for everything, and the state of modern computing means that we don't have to bother -- even while many of us decry the inefficiency of things like Electron, or in attempting to write a high-scale distributed system in Python or Ruby. And I agree with you that it's dumb that we can throw an 8-core 4GHz CPU and 32GB of RAM at a web browser, and it can still stutter while scrolling down a page. We clearly haven't always found the best balance here. But that doesn't mean we've lost the ability to do so.

I think plenty of people have all this tribal programming knowledge, and they're doing just fine passing it along to the next generation of programmers. It's just that most people don't need to actually make use of that knowledge in their day-to-day work. Yes, I do believe that lack of use causes some atrophy, but I don't think that's the big problem that some would make it out to be.