No one could possibly thoroughly understand every single component of a piece of software of even medium complexity and that's not a bad thing.

That’s not even sort of true. I don’t know where you work, but where I work, it’s expected that we fully understand every component of what we’re working on, from the architecture to the APIs to the toolchain to the hardware.

If you’re working on a node project in JavaScript to run on an arbitrary web server, then yeah, it’s not reasonable to expect you to know every layer of the system... but if that indeed describes you, then chances are you are the type of programmer this guy is talking about.

The stereotypical project with hundreds of node dependencies? That’s what this guy’s talking about. Making a desktop app in Electron because it’s easier to develop than native? That’s what this guy’s taking about.

The progression of software engineering has made it easier and easier for beginners to program, and it’s resulted in the exact trend this writer is lamenting.

The single biggest reason I don’t use JavaScript is because I don’t know how it works. I know how C and C++ work, all the way through the compiler into the assembly and through the microprocessor. So I stick with those.

(I’m picking on JavaScript here because it’s easy to pick on, but the same can be said for Python, Java, Ruby, you name it)