Not OP but similar type of brain here. Certain types of abstractions make me uncomfortable, the worst being "trust me bro" type web framework abstractions where there isn't a direct link between A and B, just a contract definition that says "A and B will integrate... somehow".

When an API says it takes something, I need to know the exact form of that "thing". Saying "you can give it this object" doesn't suit me because where are the edge cases, where are the interactions, how can I know for sure I'm giving it what it needs. The docs never tell you where to find the object def, then you spend 3 hours diving into the source code to understand it's just a two item struct or something.

LLMs introduced an explosion of complexity, suddenly code bases sprout out of nowhere, and there's no point in following all the different datapaths through because the guy who loves testing out the latest claude will just change everything in a few days anyway.

With low level programming, nearly everything is just raw data, aligned to meaning. I like to tell juniors confused about file types, that file types are a social construct, they're just a bag of bytes with some structure. Same thing applies with low level programming. You know what a byte is, you know the endianness, the signedness, you can feel comfort in knowing you're not missing anything, and then you build up from there seeing each block build upon the previous.