A few of that generation will be drawn to understand the inner workings, thoroughly, from the very basics and first principles. Because they need to. For inexplicable reasons. They are the George Platen of the 2030s.

There was no economically justifiable reason for me to learn about compilers, operating systems, and even CMOS VLSI. But I couldn't be satisfied writing software without knowing how those things worked. I taped out a chip in which all the polygons drawn by deterministic software I'd eithe written or understood. No place+route. It was the 2000s version of non-AI coding in the 2030s -- standard cell placement is essentially gradient descent.

Some people just have to know how it works.