You can, most certainly, drive a car without understanding how it works. A pilot of an aircraft on the other hand needs a fairly detailed understanding of the subsystems in order to effectively fly it.
I think being a programmer is closer to being an aircraft pilot than a car driver.
This reminds me of the early 1980s, when home PCs were still very new, the main use cases that vendors used to promote were managing household accounts and recipes. These use cases were extremely unimpressive for most ordinary people. It took a long time for PCs to become ubiquitous in homes - until gaming and the web became common.
IDEs used to be extremely expensive back in the 1990s. IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio and IBM's Visual age for Java were quite expensive subscription as I recall. subsequently, open source IDEs like Eclipse and VisualStudio seem to have become the norm.
I read the book The Soul of a New Machine in 1982 when I was an undergraduate in India. I was so impressed that I became determined to get into software development as a career. Then I came to America for grad school and got a programming job on campus in a science lab and the first thing I saw in the computer room was a Data General MV8000. I was awestruck that I was seeing the actual machine described in the book. I still remember learning to program in C on that machine - many happy hours on weekends.
Google of today sounds a lot like the IBM of the early 90s. There were many clock watchers who came in, read the newspapers and left for the day - with a long lunch break in-between. A big chunk of these people were kicked out by the crisis that hit IBM in 1994.