There's the old trope that systems programmers are smarter than applications programmers but SWE-Bench puts the lie to that. Sure, SWE-Bench problems are all in the language of software, applications programmers take badly specified tickets in the language of product managers, testers and end users and have to turn that into the language of SWE-Bench to get things done. I am not that impressed with 65% performance on SWE-Bench because those are not the kind of tickets that I have to resolve at work, but rather at work if I want to use AI to help maintain a large codebase I need to break the work down into that kind of ticket.
Except the documentation lies and in reality your vendor shipped you a part with timing that is slightly out of sync with what the doc says and after 3 months of debugging, including using an oscilloscope, you figure out WTF is going on. You report back to your supplier and after two weeks of them not saying any thing they finally reply that the timings you have reverse engineered are indeed the correct timings, sorry for any misunderstandings with the documentation.
As an application's engineer, my computer doesn't lie to me and memory generally stays at a value I set it to unless I did something really wrong.
Backend services are the easiest thing in the world to write, I am 90% sure that all the bullshit around infra is just artificial job security, and I say this as someone who primarily does backend work now days.
Are they a constant source of low level annoyance? Sure. But I've never had to look at a bus timing diagram to understand how to use one, nor worried about an nginx file being rotated 90 degrees and wired up wrong!