To some degree, yes. They allow to write software much faster, but in order to be truly proficient, you need to know a lot of what's in the layers below anyway.

To some degree, yes. They allow to write software much faster, but in order to be truly proficient, you need to know a lot of what's in the layers below anyway. And when writing in a high level language, there are many more layers below you than when you write a device driver. So overall you have more things to keep in your head, and more things to learn. But if you do, you gain ability to move faster. So it is not necessarily worse, but just a trade-off. Also, at a high level, you typically solve different, bigger/harder problems. Someone may use Python to build a statistical model, but using a simple language that even kids use at school, doesn't mean the task would be easy. This is also reflected in salaries here where I live - embedded devs don't earn more than application devs.