Seriously, it's okay that people don't know the ins and outs of every little detail. Abstractions are useful, until they're not. And then when they're not, you go figure out the level below.
Even the most advanced, most skilled front-end devs spend 99.99% of their time not caring that the browser loads an HTML page.
If I may, a truly similar experience regarding keyboards would be this:
I had a similar experience with a coworker. When I asked him how the code that he types appears on the IDE on his screen and not on that of any of our colleagues' screens, all I got was confused looks. When I showed him that his keyboard is wirelessly connected only to his computer, which runs the IDE, and his computer is then specifically connected to his own monitor via a cable, his mind was blown.
Sometimes it becomes necessary to know how the level below works. That doesn’t mean it’s a requirement to be affective at the level above.
Not necessarily, but it did have a material effect in the original example. A web developer drug in a complex, unnecessary framework because she didn't realize that HTML forms have the ability to submit post and get data natively.
To me that's like a civil engineer building a suspension bridge over a tiny creek because they never heard of an arch design.
You're making a massive assumption that she didn't already need to use React and may have been confused at how she would make the two systems work together correctly.
So that's what's really troubled me. The companies responsible for producing this piece of garbage are actually getting into the heads of the younger generation, rendering them helpless without said garbage. I repeat, this is indeed garbage, especially React: in early 2000s we used to laugh at people mixing JavaScript and HTML, but some of them, apparently, decided it was their time to strike back.
The more important issue is, of course, that we have a generation of young people working with these "tools" which isolate them from learning things that actually matter. These levels of abstraction DO NOT add any value. These are "cargo cults" of abstractions, which without their authors knowledge (because those who invented them weren't very smart anyway) serve the purpose of keeping potentially talented and intelligent people ignorant and average. This is probably good news for somebody out there, but certainly not for us as a society.
Man I think you're thinking wayyyyy to deep into stuff.
I would add that even good old, rock solid assembler isn't a straight entry point into controlling the CPU, but is now just an abstraction over µOPs. Abstractions surround us these days, and for each of us, we find differing levels of what's tolerable vs what should be known about the next layer below.
I'm personally (kinda) ok with not knowing too much about the sub-assembler processes that happen inside the literal black box called a CPU, but I know that for branch optimisation, it's important.
* Why does a key appear on the screen when I push a button on my keyboard: no
* How is an HTTPS connection created: generally no
* How is the JavaScript library deployed: 100% yes
You might be able to throw something together that works without understanding that it is a JavaScript library with a bootstrap HTML page but if no one on your team understand that you will eventually need to find someone that does to solve a problem.
I would think that people doing web development probably benefit from a working knowledge of DNS, TLS, and PKI. Without those, I would expect a lot of readily avoidable problems with HTTPS.
In general I advocate that software engineers should have a functional, if abstract, understanding of how computers work on various levels. They might not need a detailed understanding, but people often benefit in unexpected ways from understanding the systems they work with.
[1] Not like they literally don’t know but that their code has no interaction with it.
How can she not be curious, Angular is so wrong and magical, it blows the mind to understand how it builds all that magic. Maybe your sister in law is the kind of persons who laughs at magic tricks ? I d be raging mad myself, I prefer to avoid them or Ill just be obsessed until I understand them