> For sure. You cannot have "only higher level thoughts" without doing lower level work
What do you mean? I think people routinely think about things at a very high level with almost no understanding of the lower levels. How many people use a computer each day and reason about them at a very high level while knowing nothing of capacitors, logic gates, or programming languages?
I think they didn't phrase it precisely, but my guess is the underlying idea is actually "high-level software architecture doesn't have a clear abstraction layer you can use to separate it from low-level coding (unlike logic gates, the CPU's ISA, the kernel API, etc), and so delegating the latter leads to delegating the former".
How many people struggle with their computer, or get scammed, because to them it's just icons on a screen, with not even the concept of a process, memory vs. disk, or anything? How much money is lost each year because someone doesn't know what an URL is?