Its a very understandable viewpoint. We believe that you not only can - you should. It may sound a bit utopian today, but look at what these managed cloud services really are: the new hardware. You had to manage every piece of hardware yourself in a mainframe system, because how else? Until you didn't have to. It's just so wasteful to require people do all this semi-manual work. It doesn't make any sense frankly. It has very little to do with the actual products people are building. Sooner or later in such arrangements higher-level concepts emerge and establish themselves. Just like web frameworks most recently, or hardware abstractions (drivers) in operating systems much earlier.

Exactly!

The normal, healthy version of this is building on things that are decent at what they do, but would be easier to work with for common use cases with another layer of abstraction.

Doing it primarily because multiple layers suck when used for their intended purpose may very well be useful, but it's not a sign of health.

This is like having three layers of assembly that are all horrible to write and are built one on top of the other, all operating at roughly the same "level" of the hardware/software stack, and then coming along and writing C for the third one, which will in turn generate the second, and that, the first, which will, finally, actually generate something a processor understands.

Whatever demand there is for this isn't this product or company's fault, but it's definitely a sign that something's not right. Config primitives being driven by orchestration scripts being driven by orchestration scripts being driven by orchestration scripts.

The product may be entirely fine, but the situation is ridiculous.