Most people, in fact, do not have to do this. That’s an exceptionally rare thing to do that I would estimate a fraction of a percent of developers will ever encounter.
I would have put the number at 75% rather than a fraction of a percent. What do all these people do, these "developers" that never have to use bitstrings in python, deal with encodings, endianness, interface with hardware, etc.? Are they all UI people?
Most developers interacting with files are going to be doing it through a higher level API, so while sure, technically they're stored like that, it's not like that's what the developer actually has to deal with.
And most developers don't interact with hardware day to day, no. That's an exceptionally small set of people.
But also... everyone interacts with hardware whenever they use a a computer.
I think our difference of opinion has to do with abstraction layers here. Just so you know where I'm coming from, I work on web apps in java, python, and js, C++ desktop applications, and I operate a mars rover using various domain specific languages. Before switching to engineering I was a scientist and had to deal with data collection in the lab and field from all sorts of instrumentation which often required understanding low-level protocols and the movement of bits and bytes.
It's hard for me to imagine the world you're describing... sounds like it's full of script kiddies.