Layers work to the degree that you don't need to be a subatomic particle physicist to write this comment.

There are good abstractions and bad ones, all with varying degrees of leakiness and sharp corners. The good ones definitionally prevent you from needing to understand much about what they're abstracting.

Abstraction is real. So is bad code that pretends to be an abstraction.

Small leaks in an abstraction are survivable. Small leaks in many layers of abstraction are ruinous.