The idea of doing one thing, and doing it well, isn't dependent on the simplicity of the underlying system (I imagine that PDP-11 systems seemed impressively complicated in their time, too). The UNIX philosophy is a paradigm for managing complexity. To me, that seems more relevant with modern computers, not less.

> “A program is generally exponentially complicated by the number of notions that it invents for itself. To reduce this complication to a minimum, you have to make the number of notions zero or one, which are two numbers that can be raised to any power without disturbing this concept. Since you cannot achieve much with zero notions, it is my belief that you should base systems on a single notion.” - Ken Thompson