Understanding the entire stack is in general a good thing but you're looking at it wrong. These guys are good programmers but they have spent decades doing this

Understanding the entire stack is in general a good thing but you're looking at it wrong. These guys are good programmers but they have spent decades doing this stuff so comparing yourself to them is a completely unfair comparison. Plus, like everyone else they are not objective observers and have a bias when it comes to expressing their opinions on this stuff. If all you do day in day out is optimize low level code then of course you are going to attach more value to low level optimizations and machine level understanding. Now contrast this with the likes of Alan Kay, Bob Harper, Benjamin Pierce, etc. and you notice the same pattern. These people couldn't care less about the low level details and instead espouse the benefit of high level theoretical understanding and how such knowledge advances the field. Both viewpoints are correct and balancing those two viewpoints is where the engineering aspects of software engineering come into play.