I think the point is that there's very real value in understanding how the machine works at a low level. While it might seem like arcana, and while you might think that you understand the constraints more or less and be aware of how the machine is programmed, the value comes from actually asking the hardware questions using those methods.

Unless you're very lucky, at some point in your career your high-level development is going to get constrained by some very low-level fundamentals. Knowing what's going on in the machine is going to be key to working your way through it.

Not to mention the fact that you'll have the ingrained mentality to always think about the performance and bottlenecks in your code and systems, even if you're highly unlikely to ever hit practical limits.

Knowing that stuff -- more importantly being an experienced practitioner -- just makes you a better programmer overall, and makes you more sympathetic to the hardware that has to execute your code. It's a dying skill and it's very far from being nostalgia when it can bite you in the real world very easily.

That's the point.