Yeah, you can always ship a shitty SaaS or plug libraries you don't understand into each other and still make a lot of money. But you honestly cannot do much more than that if, say, you don't know the difference between the stack and heap. Statsd is like ~4000 lines of code, which is absolutely tiny; it's a trivial codebase. You can't write fast JavaScript if you don't know how arrays are represented in memory. You can't optimize SQL queries if you don't know how a database works. Hell, you can't even create good code in general if you don't know how to compose functions properly.
The countless layers of abstraction may be useful, but without them you are basically stumbling through your day and hoping everyone else can be smart enough to let you continue to not learn anything.
The countless layers of abstraction may be useful, but without them you are basically stumbling through your day and hoping everyone else can be smart enough to let you continue to not learn anything.