This reminds me of another thing I use when teaching: a perfect model of the entire world would be just as inscrutable of the world itself.

I think having multiple layers of abstraction can be really useful and have done it myself for some agent-based models with high levels of complexity. In some sense, these approaches can also be thought of as "in-silica experiments".

You have a model that is complex and relatively inscrutable, just like the real world, but unlike the real world, you can run lots of "experiments" quite cheaply!