[megameter]

To me this is related to the "terrarium problem" of software ecosystems, where the larger the ecosystem is, the more capable it is in some sense, but the less it can actually be understood. Web tech being all encompassing has made it an unsustainably large terrarium.

And you can mitigate a terrarium's impact somewhat by defining a protocol around it, but then the protocol becomes the new terrarium. And so it goes. That is why it never really gets solved by more general-purpose layers, but it does get solved in some degree by the documentation, which at least gives you a map of the jungle, and it gets solved for any end use by distilling down to a smaller terrarium that can be understood by its definitions rather than its dependencies.