It always feels a bit like lost magic.
I sometimes wonder if there is still a lot of that magic in the tech world, but were so used to having everything abstracted away from us in multiple layers that we've lost the ability to look for it.
I think about the TLA hackers who do seemingly impossible things. Surely they must operate on this level.
I work in "lowest level" kernel development, and we're certainly operating at that layer. As for those kind of hacky solutions, we do try to avoid them, because they are, well, hacky, and therefore often hard to understand, easy to break, etc... but it does happen. Especially in prototyping, were usually anything goes to make something work initially.
Because I started in that era, I sometimes think that’s why I was motivated to learn synthetic programming for the HP 41, write the first disassembler for the HP 48SX’s ROM, why I wrote jailbreak software on the iPhone before the App Store existed. Tiny limited environments most resemble where I first coded.
It certainly tarnishes the shine to have a per-OS-version table of offsets to patch ;(