> thinking about struct packing, while younger developers simply won’t know or care
That particular ship sailed more than 15 years ago. Back then if you asked people trained on high level GC-based languages about low level details or memory allocation, they wouldn't know.
But I feel like over the last ~10 years there's been a trend back towards learning more about them (e.g., with Rust and new C# features, or with C++ Win32 programming becoming a cool hipster thing somehow)? Or maybe that's just my own personal bubble.
I do a lot of embedded C++ work and byte stream work where packing matters, but I agree with you. For most development it’s irrelevant, and in the future I expect it to be even less relevant.