I agree that she's right regarding how distributed systems will eventually work. My disagreement is not with the "what" nor the "why", but rather with the "how"

I agree that she's right regarding how distributed systems will eventually work. My disagreement is not with the "what" nor the "why", but rather with the "how". If a "better Molecule Kit" were the solution then I think we would have built one today in VR. IMO the fundamental problem is that visualizing complex systems fails because the result is either too cumbersome to be useful or too simplified. UML tried to solve that issue (in 2D) by allowing you to go into more/less detail as you need it, and yet its adoption in modern software development is uneven at best. And there's a reason why we use flowcharts mostly for beginner's problems. The actual solution, I believe, was getting away from visualizations by making robust software (well...) with clear interfaces to abstract the complexity away. Reaching this conclusion took a lot of work by plenty of brilliant minds, so I'm not faulting her for not being that accurate in that particular prediction.