>understanding pointer dereferencing and its meaning is no different than understanding lazy evaluation and strict evaluation in terms of difficulty. I would argue that lazy and strict is easier a concept to understand.

Not even close. Pointer and dereference are something we do all the time in the real world (e.g. a pointer is like the semantic between word and thing) and can have easy to understand examples (the classic storage box with holds a value, and the pointer being the number of the box, etc). Still tons of programmers can't get their head around them...

Lazy/strict is far more challenging, and whereas pointers have no mystery after understanding the basic mechanism, telling how a lazy program behaves and spends memory etc is nigh impossible above a certain complexity -- heck, this is a common lament of seasoned Haskell programmers.

>Nobody bats an eye when an article talks about cache lines and how you organize data in a multi-dimensional array (zig-zagging one way is faster than the alternative).

Many bat an eye. Heck, many not even get pointers, much less cache lines, and optimal access/sharing patterns...