@tokudan@chaos.social I hear this frequently as the explanation, but I'm personally not really convinced that that fully explains it - considering how many people there are who claim that they can fully understand such-and-such, but then are completely unaware of some of the abstractions that exist in that system, and had just assumed that the level they interacted with was the lowest level (as might happen with a non-leaky abstraction). See eg. the "C is a direct translation to machine code" belief.

I'm sure that there will be some people who can actually reason end-to-end about how those systems work. But I do not think that this scales to a generalized explanation of their reputation for accessibility.