Assuming we don't work for a high-traffic startup, what is an acceptable amount of backend knowledge a full-stack web developer should know?

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The canonical full-stack web developer is a perfectly capable back-end web developer. If your company’s website disappeared tomorrow, he should be able to completely re-engineer it. There is no ‘acceptable’ amount, they are either capable of delivering, maintaining, and fixing an entire application or they are only effective on a smaller portion of the stack.

Job titles don’t always reflect reality, and are often handed out as incentives by managers who are not fully cognizant of the implications. For this reason technical interviews are focused on figuring out exactly where the candidate is at career-wise.

Full-stack devs are rare, but are getting more commonplace due to code schools pumping out modestly-skilled candidates. Some of them are exceptionally talented and study enough on their own time to where they can deliver entire applications including the devops in a few short years. Most of them should be considered only for junior dev positions, as they don’t know enough to be trusted with any kind of real responsibility.