Before dismissing it out of hand, take a look at the Go language. It was designed to make specific kinds of common abstractions hard exactly because, when working at scale, programmers routinely create disasters by layering abstractions in a way that nobody can understand the consequences of.
This is exactly the kind of pseudo-wisdom that I read the GP as referring to, though.
In the case of Go, the core team saw the pain of indirection-masquerading-as-abstraction in complex Java/C++ codebases and considered the whole thing to be a boondoggle. As a result of this we’ve been saddled with a popular language in which two massive projects (gvisor and kubernetes) have had to hack their own expressivity into the language just to build complex software (i.e. codegen’d generics)
I worry about the cyclic nature of progress in our industry, where wonderful advancements can be made and then walked back or under-utilized because we aren’t patient enough to learn them thoroughly.
