Are you a graphics programmer, or are you just saying this because that's true in the CPU world (where you have experience)? From both my own and my colleagues'

Are you a graphics programmer, or are you just saying this because that's true in the CPU world (where you have experience)? From both my own and my colleagues' experiences, I would 100% disagree: the nature of GPU architectures means you are forced to deal with super low-level details from the very beginning. Part of this is because graphics (and GPGPU compute) programming is inherently performance-constrained: if it wasn't, you could just do your work on the CPU with much less of a headache. Even just generally though, the path to running code on a GPU is much simpler — the hardware does less work for the programmer, there's no operating system to manage threads, everything's a single binary, etc. — which means that there's less to insulate you from what's underneath.