For now, I can imagine a not too distant future where this is largely untrue.
LLMs are an abstraction just like machine code -> assembly -> C/JVM -> some lang -> LLMs?
At some point you stopped needing to understand the layer down because the layer you were on became so good. Yes there are always corner cases, but for the vast majority of developers/engineers out there, staying at your layer was enough to make a career out of it once your layer hit a certain maturity.
LLMs are an abstraction just like machine code -> assembly -> C/JVM -> some lang -> LLMs?
At some point you stopped needing to understand the layer down because the layer you were on became so good. Yes there are always corner cases, but for the vast majority of developers/engineers out there, staying at your layer was enough to make a career out of it once your layer hit a certain maturity.