I've often thought in similar terms... and I think everyone has a different story here.
I used to write some simple software (we're talking some ASM and some BASIC here, with some C and Pascal - no OOP or design patterns or fancy stuff.... I was young, it was a while ago). At some point I took some digital electronics course, and at some point during that course, when we moved from transistors to discrete logic ICs to Intel 8080 trainer boards programmed in Octal - something clicked. I got it. I couldn't necessarily go out and build you a CPU - but I get it.
Networking too.. I get it, down to the electronics, the modulation, the analogic/digital circuitry. I get it enough to understand what's on both sides.
So where's my magic? I may not understand the hellishly complex details in anything past the 486, with all the pipelining and caching and whatnot, but I get it enough to know what it's about. There's no magic - I know I could go study (probably for a good long while) and understand it better.
So now there's no more magic (I never really felt there was, I knew I could always pick up a book and figure it out) - but there is discovery. It's the software patterns, the network protocols. It's complex systems and emergent behaviour. It's the interface between humanity and computers. I get the internet (and local networking, and network stacks) down to the bits - I love it when I find a mysterious network behaviour that I can't seem to grok in my head - because I know that either I'm being fed faulty information, or my mental model is wrong (which means I might learn something - which is always good). I love an especially frustrating problem.
As a generalist - a lot of that knowledge goes unused. I get how SSDs work (I'm using one now) - I've had a decent career, and there are tons of avenues I could take if I need a hobby.. because it's all interesting. But there's no magic.
I used to write some simple software (we're talking some ASM and some BASIC here, with some C and Pascal - no OOP or design patterns or fancy stuff.... I was young, it was a while ago). At some point I took some digital electronics course, and at some point during that course, when we moved from transistors to discrete logic ICs to Intel 8080 trainer boards programmed in Octal - something clicked. I got it. I couldn't necessarily go out and build you a CPU - but I get it. Networking too.. I get it, down to the electronics, the modulation, the analogic/digital circuitry. I get it enough to understand what's on both sides.
So where's my magic? I may not understand the hellishly complex details in anything past the 486, with all the pipelining and caching and whatnot, but I get it enough to know what it's about. There's no magic - I know I could go study (probably for a good long while) and understand it better.
So now there's no more magic (I never really felt there was, I knew I could always pick up a book and figure it out) - but there is discovery. It's the software patterns, the network protocols. It's complex systems and emergent behaviour. It's the interface between humanity and computers. I get the internet (and local networking, and network stacks) down to the bits - I love it when I find a mysterious network behaviour that I can't seem to grok in my head - because I know that either I'm being fed faulty information, or my mental model is wrong (which means I might learn something - which is always good). I love an especially frustrating problem.
As a generalist - a lot of that knowledge goes unused. I get how SSDs work (I'm using one now) - I've had a decent career, and there are tons of avenues I could take if I need a hobby.. because it's all interesting. But there's no magic.
TL;DR: The only magic left is human behaviour.