Reading that particular section made me think of the tree swing cartoon [1]. I agree that the best engineers have likely been on the ground making concrete changes at some point, watching bricks being laid as you said, but I have encountered quite a few supervisors who seemingly had no idea how things were being implemented on the ground. As the post says, people on the ground then sometimes have to figure out how to implement the plan even if it ignores sound design principles.

I don't view that as a failure of abstraction as a design principle as much as it is a pitfall of using the wrong abstraction. Using the right abstraction requires on the ground knowledge, and if nobody communicates that up the chain, well, you get the tree swing cartoon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_swing_cartoon

I agree with you. But, talk too long or too fulsomely about "abstractions" or "principles" and you'll lose the brick layers. They're paid by the course, generally. Trust them to make the site adjustments, but always verify that it's not a bad-bad-thing.