I would say that the validity of this argument depends entirely on the availability of hardware. To take an extreme example, reference counting would have been

I would say that the validity of this argument depends entirely on the availability of hardware. To take an extreme example, reference counting would have been completely infeasible in the days of assembly programming. An assembly programmer who had this insight would have had to wait decades for the hardware to catch up. I'm sure more and more tools, language constructs and compiler features will emerge in the coming years to reduce the cognitive load on developers so that they can focus more and more on the business logic. But that doesn't invalidate the some of the discipline you need to make software fast and stable today.