Honestly, i've received a formal MSc education in the hardware aspects, including for designing embedded electronics products. Spent the most part ofy career in the software industry designing enterprise software and feel like i never needed to use them, except maybe early in my career when i was reviewing tech stacks and determined that .NET would be among the winning horses, precisely because it'd take care of that for me almost all the time.

What i see today is the opposite of what you see : product owners not knowing a thing about software engineering but being able to vibe code prototypes handed over to the dev team are rock stars.

They are closely followed by senior software developers having more of an architecture & design background than a low-level computer science background. Most businesses are looking for builders these days.

Where what you say may converge with my observation is that to be able to do to things such as proper database query optimization, even using AI assistance, you need to be able to understand the concepts of working memory set, cache misses etc...

I've found huge problems, like database servers being grossly underprovisioned (like, 60% cache hit, 4gb RAM server for a 700gb dataset with an 50gb circa hot data set). SSD were used and only latency was measured, so no one realized how problematic the situation was (including a consulting shop they hired to help them manage their DBs - backup, maintenance etc...).

However, having a high affinity with hardware is not a driver / computer science of hiring decisions from what i can see in the enterprise software world. But it would make sense for it to become the case within 10 years. I suspect that you work in a niche where performance optimization matters a lot.