This is a very general issue in computing. You could make many of the same arguments about a web app running on a computer and all the involved modules (graphic

This is a very general issue in computing. You could make many of the same arguments about a web app running on a computer and all the involved modules (graphics, networking, JS VM, app code itself, etc). We have abstractions and interfaces that enforce separations of concerns, which give us many desireable properties, but at the same time there's an attraction, especially for performance in exchange for modularity, to do some "layering violations" to take advantage of knowledge of unexposed internals of other modules. I think one way around it and to have the cake but eat it too would be to enable some whole-system program transformations, a bit like what unikernels have started nibbling at the edges of.