Anyone who becomes sufficiently experienced in a domain will inevitably learn and take advantage of their underlying platform's characteristics. A web develope

Anyone who becomes sufficiently experienced in a domain will inevitably learn and take advantage of their underlying platform's characteristics. A web developer who wants an app to load and render quickly will take advantage of the browser's characteristics. For example, loading compressed assets in the right order to get a short time-to-first-paint, updating styles without reflowing the page, using requestAnimationFrame to render animations at a consistent frame rate and play nicely with the event loop, etc. Likewise, a systems programmer ends up learning the quirks of their OS and hardware. For example, loop tiling to take advantage of cache locality, reducing data dependencies to reduce pipeline hazards, using splice() to copy data on Linux to avoid context switching, etc. It's all just programming. Even if the distance from hardware is different, the concepts are consistent. Historically, hardware has been under-documented, which I think led to the community glorifying low-level programming. But under-documented and buggy platforms are essentially universal nowadays, so I think the low-level vs high-level distinction is not very useful.