[vouwfietsman]

> but having a generation of developers unable to do anything outside their chosen layer of abstraction is a sad state of affairs.

This is the normal state of affairs, and is really the only reason we can build meaningful software systems. Software is much too complicated, to understand even one layer of abstraction can be a multi decade journey. The important thing though, is that when the abstractions are leaky (which they always are), the leakiness follows a good learning curve. This is not true for cloud though.