Eh, the way I see it the entire practice of computer science and software engineering is built on abstraction -- which can be described as the the ability to not have to understand lower levels -- to only have to understand the API and not the implementations of the lowest levels you are concerned with, and to have to pay even less attention to lower levels than that.

I want to understand every possible detail about my framework and language and libraries. Like I think I understand more than many do, and I want to understand more, and find it fulfilling to learn more. I don't, it's true, care to understand the implementation details of, say, the OS. I want to know the affordances it offers me and the APIs that matter to me, I don't care about how it's implemented. I don't care to understand more about DNS than I need. I definitely don't care to spend my time futzing with kubernetes -- I see it as a tool, and if I can use a different tool (say heroku or fly.io) that lets me not have to learn as much -- so I have more time to learn every possible detail of my language and framework, so I can do what I really came to do, develop solutions as efficiently and maintainably as possible.

You are apparently interested in lower levels of abstraction than I am. Which is fine! Perhaps you do ops/systems/sre and don't deal with the higher levels of abstraction as much as I do -- that is definitely lucrative these days, there are plenty of positions like that. Perhaps you deal with more levels of abstraction but don't go as deep as me -- or, and I totally know it's possible, you just have more brain space to go as deep or deeper on more levels of abstraction as me. But even you probably don't get into the implementation details of electrical engineering and CPU design? Or if you do, and also go deep on frameworks and languages, I think you belong to a very very small category!

But I also know developers who, to me, dont' want to go to deep on any of the levels of abstraction. I admit I look down on them, as I think you do too, they seem like copy-paste coders who will never be as good at developing efficient maintainable soltuions.

I started this post saying I think that's a different axis than what layers of abstraction one specializes in or how far down one wants to know the details. But as I get here, while I still think that's likely, I'm willing to consider that these developers I have not been respecting -- are just going really deep in even higher levels of abstraction than me? Some of them maybe, but honestly I don't think most of them, but I could be wrong!