Maybe this unfairly off topic, but in reading the intro, my thought was not that things become brittle and hard to change because of the inelegance of the abstractions, but because of the banal dynamics of work. Mostly, people act quickly towards short term goals, without full understanding. They accept technical debt, they pass things between people, and the numbers to avoid making things kinda gross just never work out.

I think they would say that their goal is to make the less-gross approach the path of least resistance (or at least closer to it, no tool can force you to solve the right problem). Or rather, that even when someone takes a short term approach, it's not that hard to fix because the system is more flexible overall. That would be my goal, certainly, if I were founding this company.