Yeah, I was just chatting with another principal eng friend recently where maybe a whole new generation of programmers may be several degrees away from topics like operating systems, compilers, computer security and networking.

Once in a while, (lower level) software needs to be rewritten as underlying invariants go out of fashion. Think filesystems due to hardware access patterns etc. - to unlock magnitudes of performance improvements. The scary part is maybe we'll never have enough programmers to know how to do "the hard stuff" anymore. I hope I'm proven wrong though!