I hear you. There was a time when I could pretty much describe everything that happened from the time you pressed a key to the time a file was displayed on your screen: exception/interrupt handlers, keyboard driver, network stack, storage stack, context switches, page faults, etc. And that was a pretty good chunk of what I needed to know in order to do many useful things. Now some of those pieces aren't even relevant any more, the others have all become far more complex, and new ones keep being added at an ever increasing pace. Nobody but nobody can know such a high percentage of what's going on as many of us once did. I'm not saying it was better, but I do miss it.
For example: On an IBM PC, running DOS. You could know all there was to know about the BIOS, hardware ISRs, DOS ISRs, DMA, how a file system works, and maybe a bit about the graphics system, and you could make the machine do anything you wanted.
Today, if my kid wanted to learn all those things, I wouldn't even know where to tell him to start. You simply can't get that low (easily) anymore, or know that much about numerous subsystems. And the higher level stuff, like you say, is buried in layers of abstraction.
Of course, now we have an unprecedented access to cheap, powerful microcontrollers and SBCs, which make up for it to some degree - but it's still harder to translate that knowledge into something of perceived usefulness on a 'proper' computer.
You know, it’s pretty interesting that IBM was painted as the devil, but that they made this standard, interoperable computer system that you could touch at such a low level. Now it’s all Windows 10 and MacBooks and Linux userland, and even if it were possible, good luck finding documentation for any of that.
