The variety of tools that many software engineers work with today is so large that I find it virtually impossible to fully master them.

Let's say a software engineer writes a C++ application that stores documents in an inverted index and he also takes care that the program is stored in a docker container and deployed to Elastic Kubernetes Service via Jenkins. Good luck understanding your IDE, C++, Tries/Radix trees, docker, Jenkins and EKS "all the way down to the metal".

It may be possible for a small subset of those but if the expectation for great engineers really is to deeply understand "all that they touch", I wonder how many can keep up with this standard.