Abstraction Stacks Degrade Software Quality

Modern apps ride deep stacks (React→Electron→Chromium→containers→orchestration→VMs) where each layer adds 'only' 20–30% overhead that compounds into 2–6× bloat and harder‑to‑see failures. The result is normalized catastrophes—like an Apple Calculator leaking 32GB—because cumulative costs and failure modes hide until users suffer. — If the industry’s default toolchains systematically erode reliability and efficiency, we face rising costs, outages, and energy waste just as AI depends on trustworthy, performant software infrastructure.