The parent is not wrong, coming up on two decades in this industry(and much more to keeping before that), the number of times I've encountered a binary tree is

The parent is not wrong, coming up on two decades in this industry(and much more to keeping before that), the number of times I've encountered a binary tree is near zero. Only thing close was BSP trees in some engines we've licensed. There are parts of CS that get heavily over emphasised and parts that are neglected but super important. It's also been my experience that the hardware things you mention are not well understood by most developers(it's a level of abstraction that honestly they don't need to worry about unless you want the last bit of performance from a piece of hardware).