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Just a matter of where and how you worked.

I would expect anyone doing sysadmin work on Linux in any sort of centrally managed network would have exposure to it. It is certainly relevant any time you are messing with NIS/LDAP configs and troubleshooting.

Your typical developer, even doing C app development I wouldn't expect to have interacted with nsswitch unless their local name resolution was broken somehow and they were trying to fix their own problems.

I tought LDAP/YP already configured that upon proper configuration.

I feel like someone has opened a jet engine and showed me there’s a hamster wheel in there; I had no idea this even existed

Came up in my first few years of using Linux, as a kid, at home, to get NetBIOS and Avahi name resolution working so my device could access Windows network shares and other things by name. No fancy enterprise use case required; just being able to ping a computer on the LAN by name involves nsswitch.conf!