Modern software development is about management of complexity. That's why you have abstraction, that's why you have CI, that's why you have automated tests. Ha

Modern software development is about management of complexity. That's why you have abstraction, that's why you have CI, that's why you have automated tests. Having multiple independent state machines isn't necessarily a failure of system thinking. To extend your processor argument, do you think there is only one state machine in (each core of) an x86 processor?