You should understand the principles before accessing the short cuts.

I don't really agree with this take. The reason we teach kids mental calculus is to indeed understand basic principles, but only because their further education is based on those principles.

But it doesn't generalise to everything. I don't need to understand assembly or the basic principles that make a computer work to be a good software engineer using high level programming languages.

And this might be an unpopular take, but you don't even need to understand well low level development to be a good software engineer using high level languages.