One could argue it was never all that common, except for a period where the “lower level” was all that was available. Though I have seen (possibly anecdotal) i

One could argue it was never all that common, except for a period where the “lower level” was all that was available. Though I have seen (possibly anecdotal) interest in some microcontroller hobbying with younger geeks, including ESP32 stuff. But this way of thinking can also be applied to other industries. What ends up happening is that specialization forms. There are still (young even) people that get into low level languages, including assembler when optimizations require it (though compilers just keep getting better). There’s also the inevitable back and forth between abstraction, then a reversal to simplify and remove layers. You had low level (binary/assembler) higher (C), higher (java JRE, python/perl/JS and other interpreted languages) and now there’s interest in Rust, which is a bit of a modern twist on lower level programming. You see this back and forth elsewhere. Computing work used to be done on the server side (mainframes), then distributed out to individual computers, and then back to the cloud, and next (LLMs maybe)?