Interesting, I've always though that at a conceptual level computers are not especially complicated machines (for example a turing machine) and most reasonably intelligent people shouldn't have any problem understanding them.

It's also interesting that you mention the holistic approach because this is exactly how many people view computers, in the same way they might view a mechanical device. I have seen people reason "If a reboot doesn't fix it , maybe 2 or 3 reboots in quick succession will".

It's also scary how many professional IT people seem to have a cargo cult understanding of computers. I've seen people do all kinds of crazy incantations , for example troubleshooting a network problem by re-installing OS software on multiple workstations and trying different combinations of firewall / AV and network driver software when in fact 5 minutes of methodical probing with wireshark would have made the issue obvious.