This resonates with me. When I was an undergrad about 25 years ago most intro to programming classes were taught in C. There were a lot of concepts I struggled with at the time that now I find trivial. In retrospect, what I was really struggling with was some of the lower level gnarly bits C exposes to the programmer.

While it's good that I know how those things work, I did not need to understand them to just get a basic understanding of strings, data structures, etc. For instance it wasn't that I couldn't grok linked lists, I couldn't grok pointer manipulation at the time. But that still meant my code didn't work.