The non-computer people comment refers to the folks in the video; not this forum.
You also seem to be conflating right to repair vs. right to inspect code because you feel you have the right to do so for some reason (safety, don't like how it works, etc...). You don't have that right just like you don't have the right to walk into an assembly plant to see how your vehicle is assembled.
"The code, safety critical code especially, should be clear and should itself document the quirks of whatever it interacts with"
Agree and it does and we are audited by a 3rd party trained to looked at code written according to functional safety guidelines (ISO26262). Companies, like mine, don't have resources to respond to folks untrained on such matters. And for the non-safety aspects of the code, that's our intellectual property and our competitive advantage.
"Embedded has a culture of punting on abstractions due to the pervasiveness of cross cutting and global concerns"
You have data or proof of this or are you just talking from your personal experience? I assure you we take safety very seriously. Multiple millions are spent, as I said above, on testing to make sure code performs as expected; especially when a 3rd party audit and billions are on the line and, more importantly, the safety of our customers. You're inspection of the same code simply can't compete with the level of testing & auditing. You're really kidding yourself if you think otherwise.
"but 32-bit devices with dynamic allocation performing high level logical processing"
Certain ASIL ratings dictate thou shall not perform dynamic allocations. You don't appear to be up to speed on functional safety matters.
"unreasonable is to force purchasers and users of heavy equipment to blindly trust the software controlling those devices."
Not true, disagree. It's unreasonable to assume we don't take safety seriously and demand to see our code when you can look at any company's functional safety audit records (they are public). To presume a right to change the code because you're not happy with some aspect of some functionality or you're concerned about safety is not your right and no company has the resources to support these requests from the general customer or public base. Moreover, as I already pointed out, it's our IP.
IP type code in this field is heavily guarded. Swath generation, swath acquisition, path planning are all very interesting algorithms that represent a company's IP.