I'm not convinced that matters, anymore than you need to understand printing to read a book.
I think so.
I'm not sure you need to know about printing to write a book though. Might be useful in publishing.
I don't think you've got the right analogy there. The writing vs. printing a book would apply to the likes of wordpress websites and blogs where all you are supposed to have to do is add content.
I'm talking about web sites and applications whose application logic and code has been written by people who don't understand the web, because a tool has been shoved under their nose that has hidden all that from them and enabled them to knock something up. And not just voluntarily used web sites either, but business to business applications that employees of companies and public sector organisations are told they they must use.
So a better 'books' analogy would be say if there was a massive demand for non-fiction books in schools and there weren't enough being printed, and I, crafty snake-oil salesman that I am, set up a dodgy business producing 'home brew' printing presses that produced fairly crap books but that didn't require any particular printing skill to use, and all and sundry started buying them and printing books, to sell to schools, despite having no knowledge of printing but were able to print books using the 'easy' home printing press that they've bought - and meanwhile I'm selling so many of these dodgy printing presses I become the richest bloke in the world out of it.
(For the sake of this analogy, the 'content' of the books, and who produced/produces it, is irrelevant - let's say it's
old handed-down stuff that's out of copyright, or it's a pop-up book, or a dictionary, say - the importance is the printing process and who does it and how.)
I take it you can gather from this that it's not primarily the content authors or even the home printers I'm having a dig at, but the inventor of the home-brew printing press...