I'm not sure. Me and my coworkers have been saying similar things for a while, and it's not really that deep of an observation. Abstraction can't always magically make things easier. It just moves the complexity around, and often increases it if used unnecessarily.

Right, it's very similar to things i've said too, but clearly and succinctly put!

I see a similar problem with the common preference for unit tests over integration tests. The mistakes in a system tend to be in the interactions between parts, not in the parts themselves, and by construction, unit tests can't test those.

If this were printed on a wall somewhere at my first job it probably would have accelerated my career by a decade or so.