I do think Knuth explains things very well. What possibly makes it difficult is he tries to keep it at a fundamental level rather than through the lens of any m

I do think Knuth explains things very well. What possibly makes it difficult is he tries to keep it at a fundamental level rather than through the lens of any modern platform. One of the best chapters on random numbers is a good example. Beginner programmers might learn to import random (or secrets), lower level might learn to read from /dev/urandom and OS designers might ask a modern CPU directly. But that's not good enough. All of them depend on the fundamental concepts outlined by Knuth and do will any future computer.