> Only in software do we accept engineers having the absolute bare minimum knowledge and skill to complete their specific job.

You can require that your frontend engineer absolutely must have good assembly knowledge but you'll pay more for them and fall behind your competitors. You can require that your DBA knows how to centre text with CSS, but you'll pay more for them and fall behind your competitors. You can require that the people managing the data centre understand the internals of the transformer architecture or that the data scientists fine tuning it understand the power requirements and layout of the nodes and how that applies to the specific data centre, you'll just pay more for someone who understands both.

Everyone requires the bare minimum knowledge to accomplish their job that's pretty much the definition of "require" and "minimum", limited by your definition of someones job.

"software" is such a ludicrously broad topic that you may as well bemoan that the person who specifies the complex mix of your concrete doesn't understand how the HVAC system works because it's all "physical stuff".

> but having a generation of developers unable to do anything outside their chosen layer of abstraction is a sad state of affairs.

Whether it's sad depends if they're better in their narrower field, surely. It's great if we can have a system where the genius at mixing concrete to the required specs doesn't need to know the airflow requirements of the highrise because someone else does, compared to requiring a large group of people who all know everything.