Re: The way in which this turd is being pushed “top down” makes me want to puke
"Because, somehow, one can be a systems programmer without knowing how a computer actually works."
That's what they want ... the cachet of being a systems programmer without having to put in the work to understand how it all fits together. For some unknown reason, they expect some library somewhere to do all the work of understanding the underlying hardware for them.
Sorry, kids. Crawl, then walk, then run. There are no shortcuts. Not in kernel programming.