Your post is absolute nonsense. Plenty of people know exactly how everything on a plane or car works, or a CPU. I've worked with tons of people who do.

The fear of deskilling is very valid and is already messing things up.

My understanding was that for every component there's someone somewhere who understands exactly how it works at least in terms of smaller components/abstractions and for each of those, recursively, someone knows how it works

We're losing a respect and understanding of how basic competence works.

> Nobody understands everything about how an airplane works, not even the lead engineers. Nobody understands everything about how a car works

Of course people do.

"I'm clueless and don't know how anything works, therefore experts don't exist" is one of the worst takes to come out of this godforsaken tech.

This sounds awfully like the self-soothing mantra slop-kiddies everywhere tell themselves.

Plenty of people have a deep understanding of software/hardware, as that's the context here. I personally can take you from usermode, through the kernel (both NT and Linux), down to the hardware interface, explaining the vast majority of systems along the way, and critically, as they relate to performance concerns.

So can plenty of others who actually know+understand things.

You picked very bad examples. There are plenty of people who know exactly how everything in a plane or car works, how taxes work, how medical billing works, how a Cpu works.

Cal used to require EECS students learn how to make a basic CPU. Students at CalTech learn how to make advanced planes as student projects.

This is textbook whataboutism.