This question and the associated discussion remind me very strongly of something I learned very early in own professional C++ development:

C++ the language is an extremely leaky abstraction. There are so many places where you really do need to think about what the compiler is doing and what is happening behind the scenes rather than thinking at a consistent abstract level.

Is that a bad thing? I suspect that C++ programmers would say no. But then again, there would be a lot of bias in that answer...