I see what you mean but there's a huge gap between a "good enough" mental model of how computers work and the actual in-depth details that GP means and that hav

I see what you mean but there's a huge gap between a "good enough" mental model of how computers work and the actual in-depth details that GP means and that have been successfully abstracted away from us. For example: the amount of cases when I have needed to know about the details of how the transistors in RAM chips are laid out have been extremely minimal. Nor have I ever had to worry about the encoding scheme used by the transceivers for the optical fibers that my TCP packets move across. Obviously there jobs out there that do have to worry about these things (mostly at companies like TSMC and Cisco), but in practice I doubt regular engineers at even the largest scale software companies have to worry about stuff like that.