Comment by PunchyHamster

> Can you create incredibly useful code without that knowledge today?

You could do that without that knowledge back in the day too, we had languages that were higher level than assembler for forever.

It's just that the range of knowledge needed to maximize machine usage is far smaller now. Before you had to know how to write a ton of optimizations, nowadays you have to know how to write your code so the compiler have easy job optimizing it.

Before you had to manage the memory accesses, nowadays making sure you're not jumping actross memory too much and being aware how cache works is enough