That's today, but it wasn't so initially. You'd learn about your monitor's scan modes, how the disk is structured, dumping bytes between devices, optimizing for load by placing bytes on the outer sectors of floppy disks, using RAM as a disk to speed things up, and whole lot of "useless" things that build machine sympathy.
Yes, but it's also true that drivers and peripherals are generally a lot more complicated today and hardware services more federated across layers of dependency and security than in the days of DOS or Windows 3. Reverse engineering today's Windows 10 wifi-based encrypted RAID disk array is a good deal trickier than a 30 year-old DOS FAT IDE drive ever was.
Well you still have easier and more difficult distros. You can go easy route and play with Ubuntu or Fedora but you can approach linux from the hard side and try Arch or Gentoo
