That's depressing. Developers are the ones who have to understand this. In IT it's common to find people (even "DBAs") who have made a career of following procedures someone else wrote.
Would they be better at their job if they did? Probably. But do they have to? I'm not so sure anymore.
More so, I think it comes more with modern languages that don't force you to manage memory anymore. When you don't need to alloc/free everything you're using, it is easy to get lazy. Factor in never generation who've never worked outside a managed memory language. There are minute details about retaining references, having multiple copies of the same data, or other leaks (file descriptors?).