Comment by joe_the_user

"Hide the bad parts behind a good API... It works so much better than the bad parts being distributed everywhere!"

This doesn't work for the "bad things" I know of. All of the low-level bad parts which are truly bad/mucky, are bad because they can't be entirely hidden. They are leaky abstractions and by that fact, they ... leak. They impact every part of the system so they are "distributed everywhere" in the sense that the maintainer of a large program has to consider them everywhere even if they only directly show up in a few places.

Just as an example, programming languages are abstractions over the complex structure of "raw" memory. Pythons hide this abstraction more than for example c but once you reach a certain scale the use of python, you have to consider the details of its use of memory. And that's memory in general, which people work at to make reasonably regular as well as fast.

That's not saying you can't have an API that makes the low-level problems less.