There have been various improvements in programming that reduce accidental complexity but they don't apply in every area. For example, Ruby on Rails makes it ea

There have been various improvements in programming that reduce accidental complexity but they don't apply in every area. For example, Ruby on Rails makes it easier to create an MVP, but scaling an application to millions or billions of users will still require working on many layers of "accidental" complexity (since scaling isn't an inherent part of solving the problem). Running applications in the browser also adds "accidental" complexity since certain details of the product now need to be defined in both the browser and the server. Testing can also get more complicated as there are more layers and services interacting with each other. It seems as hardware and software improve, the demands on them increase as well. So we can't just relax and enjoy a world of Essential complexity. Meanwhile as machine learning gets more advanced, it's able to tackle certain "essential complexity" problems that were supposed to always require hand-coding by a human programmer. So there are trends working in many different directions.