Formal training with something like a CS course definitely starts with limited systems progressing to larger systems. So if you've been through that pain, I could see the bitterness. However, I'd wager the vast majority of coders did not take a CS course, and are self taught or boot camp grads. It's not really their fault they don't know assembly. It's just not something they've ever or will most likely never need to deal with for they day job.

Nope, I am talking about people with CS degrees.

In the mid 2000s, intro CS classes started focusing on Java. These days Python occupies a similar niche. It's not until they start to take an operating systems class, possibly by junior year, that a student might be confronted with manual memory management.

Interesting. My CS course started right out of the gate with assembly. My fledgling computer course in high school started with Pascal instead of BASIC. Clearly, before "mid 2000s". Maybe I was taking classes out of order??? It was way to long ago for me to remember those details, but I was well underwater trying to jump right into the low level language. I remember struggling with pointers in Pascal until one day it finally clicked. Assembly came across to me as a weed out course right at the beginning.

The painful thing is when someone describes themselves as a “full stack developer” but lack any mechanical sympathy for what the processor, memory, and I/O buses are actually doing.

This doesn’t require a formal education. I was self-taught long before studying CS institutionally. And per the article I am super grateful to the 6502 for being the platform that I learned from.

I mean, no, that's mostly not what I'd consider a full stack developer myself and I've been around a long time. You can be full stack grabbing everyone else's libraries and making an app spit data from the db to the UI.

Simply put the vast majority of developers will never need this information nor be resource constrained that they'll need to use their time to understand the issue deeper.

That anyone felt the need to justify mediocrity merely confirms the extent of the problem.