> I don't know the reason but I can see this happening in PHP. Things that were very simple and straightforward are now obfuscated withing layers upon layers of abstraction.

Abstractions that do not fix any of PHP's problems by the way (like its chaotic std lib, its weird mix of dynamism and rigidity, bizarre alt syntax for control flow, all the error reporting cruft, adhoc variable creation as side effect of certain function calls, context-less output buffers, antiquated scoping rules...), PHP is just adding features to the language without removing the bad parts. The irony, it's so bad as being a templating language PHP devs are using another templating language on top of it(smarty,...).