alt Hacker News12 years ago I certainly did not know why a servers IO would be slow, short of just the physical storage was slow. I think you might just be overestimating how much stuff people knew rather than the whole population forgetting how filesystem and IO internals work.
you hadn’t heard of RAID, readahead, write-back/write-through, stride or even just the concept of fragmentation?
Even if you didn’t, I doubt you didn’t have someone on staff who did know about these things and would help out randomly with troubleshooting and avoiding footguns.