Dunno if what we're making by building ever higher jenga towers of abstractions is actually progress. Most of the software that is built that way hasn't significantly increased in its actual capacities in the last few decades (despite running on a thousand times more powerful hardware).
The software that has brought new things to the table has mostly been built close to the hardware, far away from the apex of the software stack. Stuff like redis, the recent AI boom, none of that is built in wasm or electron. The genuinely impressive leaps forward haven't been made by gluing together APIs or python calls.
From a personal experience, whenever I've built something genuinely new or impressive, it's always been by combining high and low levels of abstraction. If you're limited by what you can do with e.g. a DBMS, there are things a computer could do that you simply don't have access to. If all you understand is the abstraction, you probably won't even see that. With a deeper understanding of the stack, you can bypass that limitation and in some sense work miracles.
Having access to higher levels of abstraction is also important though. Being stuck building everything from the ground up would be just as limiting as being unable to lower the abstraction level when necessary.
The software that has brought new things to the table has mostly been built close to the hardware, far away from the apex of the software stack. Stuff like redis, the recent AI boom, none of that is built in wasm or electron. The genuinely impressive leaps forward haven't been made by gluing together APIs or python calls.
From a personal experience, whenever I've built something genuinely new or impressive, it's always been by combining high and low levels of abstraction. If you're limited by what you can do with e.g. a DBMS, there are things a computer could do that you simply don't have access to. If all you understand is the abstraction, you probably won't even see that. With a deeper understanding of the stack, you can bypass that limitation and in some sense work miracles.
Having access to higher levels of abstraction is also important though. Being stuck building everything from the ground up would be just as limiting as being unable to lower the abstraction level when necessary.