The only way we'll see real 10x improvements take hold is for our discipline to mature. As long as we are experiencing high rates of growth, where all it takes is 3-5 years to become "senior", while the voices of the real senior developers are swamped by hordes of newer devs, we will wallow in inefficiency and fail to improve much.

Most of the accidental complexity I see day to day comes from slow accumulation of errors in craft. Need to validate that an ID is a least plausibly valid, "I'll just match it with a regex here", and in 27 other places in the code, each one added in a different sprint. Little things like referring to data that is passed into an api with the variable name "json" when it is really a data-structure that was parsed from the body of an API request. Is this thing I am manipulating a "tab", a "filter", a "type selector" or a "group"? When methods and variables use a mix of conflicting names for the same concept.

Until we learn, as a profession, that shipping working code is not enough, that our code must clearly, concisely, and consistently communicate the core concepts embodied in the program, accidental complexity will bury us.