Regarding practical applications, shift operators are only useful to slice and align masks and bitfields: something meaningful, simple and basic, but usually do

Regarding practical applications, shift operators are only useful to slice and align masks and bitfields: something meaningful, simple and basic, but usually done only in specific domains (e.g. handling a certain style of compact file formats) that it is perfectly normal to avoid for a whole lifetime. On the other hand, in theory bit shift operators are more important: if you don't know what they do and why you would want to do it, and if you don't know that they are fast and cheap to implement in a microprocessor and why, you cannot possibly have a good grasp of how computers work, and you shouldn't be allowed to use any remotely "low-level" programming language.