[ken]

I don't know if there's context which might change my interpretation, but from the sound of it, I disagree. This is only true in a closed system. With many things (especially software), we encounter the same types of problems again and again, so we can re-use the same solutions, which allows us to reduce overall complexity.

A program in 1985 likely wrote its own routines for memory management, math, graphics, and so on. Those add complexity. A program in 2020 almost certainly doesn't. The complexity is hidden behind nice interfaces, and more importantly, it's shared among 1000 different programs on my computer.

We traded inline complexity in 1000 places for complexity in <math.h>. That's not the fair trade that "conservation" implies.

Let's say you have some physics problems to solve. Doesn't knowing Maxwell's Equations decrease overall complexity? I don't think anyone would claim you should only learn first principles, and any other formulation only uselessly pushes the complexity around.