You are not alone. I like the idea that gauges are connected directly to the thing they are measuring. However, I may be disconnected from modern reality in that what might look like a "traditional" gauge might already be connected to the car's computer rather than direct measuring. I'm just not a grease monkey to know the inner workings.
Yeah no gauge in a modern car is directly connected to anything, except maybe the fuel gauge in a cheap car.
Everything is being run the cars ECU, all of those gauges are servo driven, all of them are getting their data in the form of discrete digital values. That’s assuming your car even has physical gauges, and not just digital gauges on a screen.
Yeah nothing in the UI is connected directly to a sensor these days. The UI is just a display for relevant data on the CAN bus.
Sensors have redundancies and detections in both sensing and communications so that the receiving end knows when there is an issue and doesn't display false information, resulting in an error code being thrown and displaying a "check engine light".
While my Honda Passport does have a reasonable number of physical buttons--which probably are still fly by wire--I'm pretty sure all the gauge displays are all just digital readouts of readings coming off the bus.
