By way of anecdotal counterpoint, I've got a teenage trainee apprentice working in my lab who can indeed read the RP2350 datasheet and describe what its doing and how to use it effectively in other applications.

I don't think things are as difficult to understand as you do - but then again, I grew up with 8-bit computers where it really was competitively important to understand how they worked - and I don't think the cyclomatic complexity of the Ashet is much greater than anything from that era.

Reading and applying the datasheet doesn't mean understanding the whole system. I don't even think a single employee of Raspberry Pi Foundation entirely understands the chip. It's a combination of IP cores and work of many different people, and probably too complex for a single person.