I don't think it did. Electrical engineers still write incredibly low-level code in embedded programming courses - we did some pretty interesting shit in MIPS

I don't think it did. Electrical engineers still write incredibly low-level code in embedded programming courses - we did some pretty interesting shit in MIPS assembler before we even touched C++ - and I doubt we were any smarter than the CompSci kids. I think it's primarily a cultural difference - modern CompSci people love treating everything as an academic exercise and hand-waving away complexity, whereas the old-school "hackers" (before CompSci was really a huge thing) would love getting into the nitty-gritty of things and didn't really give a damn about whether or not they were following best practices. If the average CompSci student (who, to be fair, is smart but not Genius-level) spent as much time reading the spec sheet for the Motorola 68000 as they did learning how and when a Turing Machine halts, they'd have no issue understanding 80's video game code.