I like the definition of magic I learned from Penn Jillette, (paraphrased): magic is just someone spending way more resources to produce the result than you expected.

This analogy baffles me. I don't think anybody here is making the argument that we must know how all of our tools work at a infinitesimally fundamental level. Rather, I think software is an endless playground and refuge for people who like to make their own flavours of magic for the sake of magic.

I feel like I'm responding more to the op. Maybe a more concrete example, there are several hit games, Undertale is one I know personally, where the creator is an artist who learned just enough programming in a relatively high level language to ship a hit and beloved game. They didn't need to know the details of how graphics get put on the screen, nor did they need to learn memory management or bytes and bits.

> I don’t like using code that I haven’t written and understood myself.

Maybe it's true for the author but it's not true for lots of productive people in every field and there's plenty of examples of excellence operating at a higher level.