That's because the institutional knowledge was passed along through the act of coding. Skills that I learned in Assembly and FORTRAN are applicable to even modern programming languages...but not to "natural language."

It really wasn't. Ask the average young coder these days how many registers their CPU has, or even the difference between the stack and the heap.

I don't agree. Certain optimization skills are learned on the job if people work in specific areas of compilers or performance.

Also the reality is that modern CPU microarchitectures are so different from what old-school assembly programmers used that their supposed optimizations are likely to be counterproductive.