I feel like the Empire in warhammer 40k operates on a similar premise, all there machune rituals and what not are just maintanance, but nobody understands the machines, so they'll just reenact what was shown to someone eons ago or what have seemed to cause some effect.

just like me blowing into NES Cartridges when a game would not start :D.

In sci-fi proper that is also a plot point of Isaac Asimov's The Foundation. The giant galactic empire collapses and all the scholars are holed up on a planet to preserve knowledge. They then go out to other planets and give technology, but everyone is so ignorant that it seems like magic and the scholars kind of roll with it.

Discworld's magic system is like this. The wizards often don't know why certain parts of a ritual or spell are in place, but it works so they don't touch it

Ive seen at least one other anime that was like that, cant remember the title but the magic system was surprisingly fleshed out for a 12 episode anime

Edit: Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor

It's also basically how the Adeptus Mechanicus operates in 40k. Lots of worshipping the old tech, preserving it, and there's some limited giant machines that they could never fathom rebuilding or even fixing so they're very protective of them

onward kinda has this, but practically everyone forgot magic

This was one of my biggest gripes with the JK Rowling Wizarding World before Rowling herself gave me other reasons to dislike it

This is something I think about a lot, and has been done well in fiction plenty already. My adhd wouldn’t just go away in a fantasy world. Sure I might have a burst of motivation for a while, but I probably wouldn’t magically be interested in studying and research just because I might be able to do some basic magic.

What fantasy world can you think of where most people bother to learn how magic works?

Eh, there's a curiosity aspect as well. I can't do work on my car, but I can change the oil, tires, brake pads, and such. I understand the principle of how an IC engine works. I'm a computer programmer but I think it's because I'm a curious person who likes knowing how things work, and computers offer more chances to learn than anything else on the planet.

It isn't ignorance that has ever bothered me about boomers, zoomers, or anyone else. It's that 99% of people you meet are fundamentally incurious. They don't care how things work, they don't care if they could work differently.

Reminds me about that line in World War Z (Max Brooks)

(Paraphrasing) "Some survivors were frustrated with the assignments they were given. A lady who was a former TV exec was furious that she was assigned to a janitorial unit, led by someone who's lifetime salary she made in a month!

For people like her, you didn't have to worry about fixing a plumbing issue or cleaning your home. She just hired someone else to do it, because she made money talking on the phone, and the more people she hired, the more time she could spend talking on the phone. After the Great Panic, nobody bothered to use phones anymore. There were no TV contracts that needed to be made, but there were toilets that needed work, and floors to clean. In a strange way, the blue collar workers outranked their "superiors" in importance to the community. We needed mechanics, engineers, HVAC workers, plumbers. We had those people of course, but there was never enough of them."

You can just download one from the App Store as of a year or so ago.

A lot of emulators are just apps, but the iso itself is a bigger mystery. My guess is an older sibling or even parent helped set that up. Nobody in their right mind would bundle a licensed game with an emulator on the app store.

I don't think it was even an emulator, it was probably the official Nintendo port called 'Super Mario Run'.

I would assume she has a nerdy family member or friend that assisted.

Smartphones have made tech interaction ridiculously accessible and also into a locked down blackbox kinda thing at the same time. Consider how everything is a website now, and yet many people don't know how to use a browser, as they install hundreds of apps instead.

It’s not an age thing so much as an “amount of interest” thing. The barriers to entry are constantly being lowered, so it takes less skill and investment to get involved in things.

It’s one thing to download a free trial of something like photoshop, it’s another thing to spend years using it to the point where you understand the full capabilities of what you can do with it.

As you get older you’ll see things that used to require a lot of effort to get into become easier and easier to access. It’s the march of technological progress, and it might make you feel like it’s devaluing the things you used to value. And then you’ll understand why your grandparents were always going on about “Back in my day…”

part of it is down to exposure as well, if you grow up in a place where you can't just buy the latest iphone every year it's a lot more likely that you'll end up fiddling around with stuff and learn how it works.

like india has a lot of this, people can't afford a new device but it's not that difficult to get some "e-waste" which is still perfectly functional (if slow), so kids are way more likely to end up fiddling around and learning.