This depends on responsibility. If you are working within a service you own, you might be working with a bunch of abstractions you need to know because it's you

This depends on responsibility. If you are working within a service you own, you might be working with a bunch of abstractions you need to know because it's your responsibility to. Layers that bifurcate responsibility (and usually team boundaries) should be readable without needing to intimately understand what problem the abstraction is trying to solve. To say you never need to understand what problem the abstraction is trying to solve (or you always need to) doesn't quite strike the practicality of how teams work together in my experience. That said, in my experience, there are a ton of leaky abstractions that really shouldn't be too.