deep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge

It came with a very detailed book. And Commodore sold another even-more-detailed-yet-still-cheap book that was so complete that it even included a big fold-out schematic diagram of the motherboard.

Would I have preferred to be able to do DRAW CIRCLE 0, 1, 23 instead of a long series of POKEs? Sure, because I was a kid and wanted to do things the easy way.

But those POKEs taught you about bits vs. bytes, and how computer memory worked, and how bitmaps worked, and about raster, and optimizing for speed, and ML interrupts, and math, and concepts like XOR, and all the important parts of the computer.

I've wondered about whether modern computers should come with the comprehensive manuals of the era. The Raspberry Pi 400 attempted to do it. But the problem isn't as much that companies don't want to ship these big manuals, but it's that 1) Nobody would read them because of the Internet and, most importantly, 2) you can't create comprehensive documentation of a modern computer in a reasonably sized book.

The biggest change from the good old days is that one could truly hope to fully understand a machine. The C64 was a bit harder, but not impossible. But the Speccy was simple enough that a near-100% understanding was achievable. This feeling of full control is what we lost.