My nephew for a while was very much one of those "grew up on devices" kind of kids - until he got off of gaming on phones and tablets, and got a gaming PC. Now he's reading about technology and tinkering and stuff.
My IRQ conflict resolution skills or knowledge about himem.sys aren't really useful these days.
But I've seen genz kids do incredible things with Minecraft mods and the like that make me reminisce about quake modding.
The masses are just blindly using devices, but the masses didn't even have a PC at home 30 years ago.
Your ability to meticulously solve a problem using a systematic troubleshooting approach is always useful. You just happened to hone the skill w/ IRQ conflicts and himem.sys.
Heck I did the same. Dip switches galore. Did I know what an IRQ actually is on the OS level while solving IRQ conflicts as a kid? Heck no! Only years later when I no longer needed to did I understand what those actually are/were.
The today equivalent of learning about autoexec.bat and config.sys to not load the cdrom driver because else this one game wouldn't start because it did not have enough memory is figuring out what's behind the Steam "Start" button and where the games "live" and how you can get what you want instead of doing everything through steam.
The kids that are the today equivalent of us in the old days do exist.
It's more systems, networks, OS fundamentals... i.e. how you pull all the pieces together and make them work especially among your "non-technical" user set.
I'm sure it's the same with young people.
All that did was result in extreme frustration. My knowledge of creating game-specific boot disks to eek out 1k more memory did nothing for my ability to write software, except perhaps to appreciate having more RAM and good UX.
I don't even know how that's possible because he plays modded versions of some of his games- how you get by without knowing what a zip file works at the surface level is a mystery to me lol.