There’s a lot of really great software out there right now, and a lot that’s terrible and I think powerful abstractions enable both.

you're thinking of the programs in low-level langs that survived their higher-level-lang competitors; if you plot the programs on your machine by age, how does the low quartile compare on reliability between programs written in each group

Survivorship bias is exactly right.

The C and assembly programs we still use are the ones that were good enough to last. The thousands that weren't are gone.

Nobody counts the programs that were never finished because the language made them too hard to write in the first place.