And the level of abstraction that is "good" changes over time and by use case. At my day job, I write both high-performance bioinformatics software and good-eno

And the level of abstraction that is "good" changes over time and by use case. At my day job, I write both high-performance bioinformatics software and good-enough-performance web software. I do need to look at the assembly & think about the internals of the CPU when I'm trying to push through billions of reads in a timely manner. But I don't need to count cycles when I'm rendering a CRUD detail page in Django - I just need to make sure my database queries are reasonable. Also, the idea that you can say some abstractions (presumably in wide use) are "objectively" bad only makes sense if you've already applied your subjective criteria.