The whole point of layers and abstractions is to reduce the number of states you have to worry about. The way that people talk about abstractions like they're a bad thing makes me think they've never really stopped and thought about all the many, many good abstraction layers they use. It makes sense: a great abstraction is basically invisible, so you don't even notice it unless you pay attention. But everyone who says "too many abstractions" has clearly not stopped and paid attention. You don't need fewer abstractions, you need better abstractions.
An abstraction layer makes itself most visible when it fails. Avoiding failure requires better or less abstraction layers. In many cases I don't trust others to build correct abstraction layers, good UI libraries, reliable GPU drivers that don't corrupt memory when sleeping the system, etc. (Filesystems and virtual memory are largely reliable in the common case, though it's still common to avoid filesystems and allocations and swapping in real-time code, and schedulers cause grief when they cause media payback to stutter when I'm running compiler jobs.) Often I trust myself to work with less abstraction layers, more than I trust others to build better ones.
