Are you at a company that tends to hire from non-traditional backgrounds? The topics you mention -- the underlying "how it works" of the tech we use to build things day to day -- should be, and in my experience are, the areas where juniors have the clearest understanding relative to more senior engineers, since they just finished 4+ years learning about it five days a week in detail.
Good point.. A lot of those colleagues were indeed either fresh out of college (math, computer science, mechanism etc...) or graduated in things like electrical engineering etc.. and worked in software roles for 3-5 years..