[Nursie]

As someone who's coded everything from web front ends to embedded systems with no OS and manual memory partitioning, via mainframes, network management tools and all sorts of other things, I'd say the benefit is pretty high!

Someone needs to know how it all works, someone needs to build the kernels, the low-level libraries, the compilers, network protocols server programs etc etc.

You can certainly have a great career without them, I wouldn't dispute that.