[_____s]

Yeah, although I think understanding how computers work at a basic level (the components of a CPU, what instructions are, caches, etc.) has a pretty good ROI because it makes it easy to understand some concepts at a higher level (concurrency for example), understand why some things work a certain way, think about some common performance optimisations, tradeoffs, etc.

I think that's true of most things—you don't need to (and likely cannot) know everything in real depth, but having some knowledge tells you where to look, what to look for, etc.

[xwdv]

A good blog post can probably explain most of the important bits of those things without investing so much time.