That’s interface compatibility, not abstraction. For your example, you can just as well say that billions of cars work well on wildly different types of roads.

That’s interface compatibility, not abstraction. For your example, you can just as well say that billions of cars work well on wildly different types of roads. Abstraction as in the throttle example is more like ORM vs. SQL (we all know someone who ran into issues with the former in a non-trivial project). You simplify the idea of X to Y, which works in Z% but breaks down otherwise.