What I've noticed is that most issues are at the leaves. Abstractions that have existed for a long time and that are used heavily tend towards being more solid

What I've noticed is that most issues are at the leaves. Abstractions that have existed for a long time and that are used heavily tend towards being more solid over time. (And more documented, well known, etc) It's the stuff at the edges that appears to be less reliable but that's mostly because it's new. It doesn't really feel like that is getting worse though. We are constantly interacting with more and more software than ever before but it's not like everything is broken. The fact that you can reliably make a phone call is far more significant than the fact that the vibration doesn't stop. Both are build on ever-increasing stacks of abstractions. The difference in that example isn't some emergent complexity -- it's just that one is more important than the other. There are lots of analogies in the physical world where less-important things are crappier than more important things. We don't consider that some crisis of abstraction.