I said modern programming languages. I do not consider C a modern language. The point still stands about abstraction in modern languages. You don’t need to understand memory allocation to code in modern languages, but the understanding will greatly benefit you.

I still contend that knowledge of the cpu pipeline is important or else your code will wind up with a bunch of code that is constantly resulting in CPU interrupts. I guess you could say you can code in assembly without knowledge of the cpu architecture, but you won’t be making any code that runs better the output code from other languages.

Assembly requires a knowledge of the cpu architecture pipeline and memory storage addressing. Those concepts are generally abstracted away in modern languages

It isn’t always that they don’t know what they want, sometimes they just don’t know how to describe what they want, or they may know what they don’t want.