> Maybe we need to take a step back and design an elegantly simple, unambiguous, auditable/analyzable infrastructure, one that's more robust against becoming too complicated in the future. "Structural minimalism", to complement minimalism in user interfaces becoming more and more popular in the recent years.

This sounds good, but in practice there are two types of complexity:

  - domain complexity, which pertains to the domain that we're working in and essentially is forced upon us by it
  - accidental complexity, which is created by all of the sub-optimal decisions and implementation details

You can and should minimize the latter, absolutely, but a lot of the former isn't viable - making systems simpler in some ways (memory allocation and access, for example) could make them perform noticeably worse. No one (amongst the end users) wants to have their hardware become slower, especially when Wirth's Law is still in full effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law ).

It would be nice if we could, but even booting operating systems nowadays gets more and more abstractions and complexities added, just look at what Microsoft are doing with Windows 11, essentially creating e-waste for controversial reasons. However, i think that people can at the very least still be competent within small subsets of the larger system, with clearly defined boundaries amongst them, as well as interfaces.

There is no such thing. Useful computations are by necessity complex (in both a human-centric view, as well as from a computability view).

There are bad abstractions, of course. But this is just a hay dream that we can design a system that would be less complex than the essential complexity of the problem at hand - and dealing with all the hardware, networking, etc is just simply hard.