If you really want to put it in his terms, the multi decade approach, things have gotten a lot easier now that we don't have to be concerned in most practical terms about how much work we're giving the computer. We don't have to be so dearly precious about Kilobytes of memory for instance. We don't even need to manage it at all really.
Whether we choose to use these new powers to make our lives easier or more complex and abstract is our own doing.
We're probably at the end of such optimizations, unless there's something fundamental in how software is designed that 1000GB of memory gives me that 1GB does not ...
Given what people are doing in JavaScript I think we entered the era where most people truly don't care about how much the computer has to do about 8-9 years ago.
The higher level pasting together of increasingly numerous, incompatible, abstract, ill fitted things making life easier has always been a fiction.
There's a maximum utility point and anything past that starts slowing the development down again.
That sweet spot has always been right about the same; if you ldd the dynamically linked programs in say /usr/bin in 2020 and 2000 and count the number of libraries per binary, the count isn't that much higher. The sweet spot hasn't moved.