> id say most people i’ve worked with start caring to learn the shell and dig into the os more around year 8 of their career
That sounds tragically late to me. It represents a serious failure on the part of those who know and love the command line to make it accessible to newcomers, imo.
Level of abstraction is largely orthogonal to the GUI/CLI divide, though.
nmcli is more abstract than ip+iw+wpa_supplicant, but it's no more or less abstract than any GUI network configuration widget.
The output of ls is no more or less abstract than the contents of a directory as displayed by a GUI file manager. It's the same metaphor and the same information displayed in two different formats.
That sounds tragically late to me. It represents a serious failure on the part of those who know and love the command line to make it accessible to newcomers, imo.