Indeed.
"It's as if you need a specific degree in radio to understand stuff that in the Good Old Days* they used to teach at, at worst, A level."
In the late 1960s a couple of 10 year old boys in Palo Alto decided that they would revisit the early days of radio for their Science Fair project. They built a couple of fairly high powered spark gap transmitters and matching receivers. Testing them between their homes (a couple blocks apart) on weekends and evenings was done in short sessions because their families bitched about radio & TV interference. They alternated who was transmitting, and cycled to a nearby park[0] to compare notes (local telephone calls cost money back then).
Come the day of the Fair, one was setup in their classroom, the other in the "Multi Purpose" room with the other displays. Everybody wanted to get a good look at their dangerous looking and sounding contraptions in operation. It took the police from Moffett Field NAS almost 45 minutes to show up and shut them down.
The resulting kerfuffle lasted a couple hours. Turned out that the Navy had been trying to find the source of the randomly occurring noise for a couple weeks, and were not amused. At all. It was a Cold War thing. However, no charges were filed ("kids will be kids!" was still an acceptable mantra). The boys were even allowed to keep their kit ... with the admonishment that they were not to ever turn it on again, in no uncertain terms.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if a couple kids tried this kind of thing today ... sadly, however, at that age they aren't taught enough of the basics to even contemplate the concept, much less attempt to implement it. Sad, that ... we've lost something as a society.
[0] Meadow Park, now called Ramos Park, if it matters to you ...