Exactly, I find this sort of nostalgizing to be unhelpful. I am not _that_ old but I did cut my teeth on C++ and learned about manual memory management, programming language design and had a few (even at the time) esoteric courses about assembly language. I am not assembly fluent and have no desire to be - but getting an understanding of how higher level code compiles into lower level assembly/machine statements is invaluable to get a sense of how performance can be manipulated and the how impactful it can be to do "silly" things like unroll loops to minimize the number of instructions needed for some higher level operation.

Issac Newton/Bernard of Chartres said we stand on the shoulders of giants and that allows us to see further afield but it also loses the detail of the ground beneath us - modern folks will no longer have the broad expertise that someone struggling through building a computer from transistors would gain through overcoming that[1], but we should learn about it academically to garner the bits of knowledge that remain salient. It is incredibly useful when experts in these highly specific fields have the communication skills and knowledge to share what is relevant to others without overwhelming them[2] with detail.

1. Real modern consumer grade computers are far too complex to understand fully without dedicating your life (or a significant portion of it) solely to that. It is more pragmatic to allow specialization and small realm expertise instead.

2. Of course, if you want to geek out and learn the minutiae that's awesome - but we can only geek so much in our limited time here.