Who's going to win?

SELinux+Seccomp+Containers...
Or the sysadmin with sudo and chmod.

Neither! It's whichever script kiddie gets lucky first.

Oh, but you gotta drop a chmod nuke at least once to feel the terror having done something irreversible. As a bonus, you’ll also gain a brand new appreciation for snapshots.

I used to love going to Babbage’s in the mall. So many King’s Quest boxes….

at least you had shoes

I work in a completely different field, but you last paragraph mostly sounds to me like a typical young person entering the job market. There is this false sense og confidence, pride and know it all when graduating. I've just seen it a few too many times and I remember how confident and skilled I thought I was when I got out. At the same time, there's some anxiety and fear of doing a bad job and admitting fault may make you seem weak or unskilled and you want to impress the mentors and blah blah blah.

It is a bit funny to remember how I thought I was going to be helpful to colleagues who were way more experienced than me and then years later I'm being talked at by soon to be graduates who are trying to be helpful by sharing tips with me that I already do on the daily or don't do because I learned years ago they don't work. And when I try to give them advice or instructions it's like they just space out and hear what they think I mean and then do something completely different from what I ask of them, haha. I can't be mad at it, because it's just a part of learning and growing into your career. I think it would be a mistake to think that a newly graduated person in any field will be able to hit the ground running without any hiccups.

Maybe I'm just a bit of a softie when it comes to young people, but I just remember how eager I was when I was in their shoes and how incorrect my assumptions were when it came to what my elders expected of me. It all came gradually as I learned how to be a professional and how to solve tasks and find my rhythm. I imagine new generations on the market can't be much different from myself in that regard. 😊

is that when prompted with something they don't know, they will spit out some randome bullshit rather than say they don't know

This is just the majority of people, not specific to any generation. Our minds are predisposed to use inductive reasoning to explain the world around us. We see something new and our brain immediately begins to make inferences based on prior information we believe we know (I say it this way cause our memories are incredibly faulty) that we think is relevant or comparable.

It's essentially the Dunning Kruger effect: we think we know more than we do and, because of this, believe we can simply assume correctly about other things we know nothing about.

It's an incredibly bad habit that is supposed to be trained out of us through our education systems but we all know how incredibly faulty those systems are.

Just get a Brother laser

I'm in high school rn. I had to use this program called TinkerCAD in middle school for some weird class on the basics of engineering. Wasn't particularly good at it, but no one needed an explanation of keyboard and mouse. Chromebooks are used heavily, so that makes sense. I never really considered that keyboard and mouse wouldn't be at least learned. I guess with smartphones and iPads it makes sense. Makes me a little sad, but whatever.