> Another way to look at this is you’re outsourcing your understanding to something that ultimately doesn’t think.
You read this quote wrong. Senior devs outsource _work_ to junior engineers, not _understanding_. The way they became senior in the first place is by not outsourcing work so they could develop their understanding.
I read the quote just fine. I don't understand 100% of what my junior engineers do. I understand a good chunk, like 90-95% of it, but am I really going to spend 30 minutes trying to understand why that particular CSS hack only works with `rem` and not `px`? Of course not - if I did that for every line of code, I'd never get anything done.
My take from this comment is that maybe you do not understand it as well as you think you do. Claiming that "other modern infrastructure" is easier to understand than CSS is wild to me. Infrastructure includes networking and several protocol, authentication and security in many ways, physical or virtual resources and their respective capabilities, etc etc etc. In what world is all of that more easy than understanding CSS?
How about a CEO delegating the work to an Engineer ? CEO does not understand all the technical detail but only knows what the outcome will look like.