It reminds me of:
https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when
and how many of today’s CS-degree holders would barely understand any of it. As someone who has also “grown up with all the technology”, I’ve learned and experienced all that. But as a percentage of “software engineers”, there’s fewer and fewer that do every day.
Under our current system, knowledge that cannot be monetized is useless. Worse than useless, in fact, because time spent learning low-level concepts is time that could be spent learning marketable skills.
The industry is effectively paying us all to forget.
Sure, learning the USB stack and differential signaling is fun, but unless my job involves implementing custom USB devices from scratch then it's pointless trivia that won't pay the bills.