Do you good understanding of where your food comes from?

How about the dollar you earned, spent, invested? Do you know how it works?

How about the clothes you wear?

This is just a tiny subset of the enormous complexity we're immersed in, and no individual or collective has a complete understanding of it. If you do, you're truly an outlier and GP's point still stands.

Yes for all the examples you gave. None of those should be beyond the understanding of a curious person living today.

Some individual has an understanding of each of those areas. Why does one individual need to know the entire food chain? The discussion point is about each specific area.

Even for the COBOL based systems someone understands it well enough at the conceptual and business level. And when there's no one to the company migrates and modernizes.

You are conflating the subject matter expert who understands one area well and others not so well with a general newbie who understands nothing well

> The discussion point is about each specific area.

I don't think it is. @squidmaster specifically noted, 'The "Renaissance man" era is long gone.'

What happens to that understanding when you're gone?