I always look at things like this and say that I wish I understood every step of the process, from electrical theory to fabrication.
I have the same approach to software, but I have to keep reminding myself that the things I'm trying to understand took hundreds of people to complete. It's an incredibly annoying internal struggle. I have no idea how to deal with it aside from grinding it all out until I die.
Author here: I don't understand every step of the process either :-) But old chips like this at least seem theoretically possible to comprehend in their entirety. I expect it would be pretty much impossible to reverse-engineer and understand a present-day processor with billions of transistors instead of thousands. But I could be surprised - 35 years from now people may be reverse-engineering Xeon chips for fun. And perhaps posting about interesting things they found in Intel's random number circuitry.
I have the same approach to software, but I have to keep reminding myself that the things I'm trying to understand took hundreds of people to complete. It's an incredibly annoying internal struggle. I have no idea how to deal with it aside from grinding it all out until I die.