It is weird to hear developers say this. The tooling around your app is essential to understanding how it runs, why would someone not know this stuff?
I know this is a dirty thought, here on Hacker News.
> Inevitably, that has an effect on relationships and general life.
I'll make another observation: I don't think so. There's plenty of people who lack curiosity that led happy lives. I don't think anyone can prove a correlation between curiosity and success in life.
Heck, one could joke that there's a reason most proverbs say the opposite, in almost every language out there ("curiosity killed the cat" in English, "curious people die young", in my native Romanian).
Developers need to understand how the layer underneath their code works. If you're writing Java, you should understand the JVM. If you're writing C, you should understand the compiler.
Yes, that's why I said "layer beneath" and not "layerS beneath"