A leaky abstraction is like obscenity: I know it when I see it. It's impossible to define the concept in a rigorous way, and yet it impacts everything that we do.

You're simply wrong to claim that we accept the situation without spending any real effort. In reality the more experienced developers who build abstraction layers tend to spend a lot of time trying to prevent leaks, but they can't have perfect foresight to predict what capabilities others will need. Software abstractions often last through multiple major generations of hardware technology with wildly different capabilities: you can't prevent those changes from leaking through to higher levels and it would be foolhardy to even try.