I don't know if I agree. Look at modern application development: even building the most basic GUI application in any platform, but especially the web, is significantly more "power-user" than Visual Basic ever was.

People are still building these apps at every level of developer experience so the kids must be alright.

Yes people, in general, have less knowledge of file systems and networking now because things just work. Every LAN party as a kid took at least an hour of networking to get started. Now kids don't do LAN parties because everything is already networked by default. But there is also an order of magnitude more people doing these things now -- in the past those people just went without.

The vast majority most of knowledge I ever had from the time the author describes is obsolete now anyway. I can still remember so much but that's not going to help me with my React app.