Right okay I ran into a very similar limitation in Unix recently.
It's really about multiplexed semantic routing.
There's no great tools, abstractions, jargon or syscalls for it.
I mean there's plenty for things like the networking stack, dbus, Wayland, and various audio stacks but they're all a pain to deal with.
Nobody has really figured it out. The list inputs, list outputs, create bridges and taps, assign properties, which is what everybody does is complicated.
I'm sure there's brilliant people that find this intuitive but for me it requires too much orchestration and feels brittle.
People see this in microservices as well.
There needs to be something as intuitive as the mouse drag (Raskin), Unix pipe (McIlroy) or drop down menu (Atkinson) to deal with this stuff.
All these "obvious" things had to be invented. There's something dumb and obvious here nobody's cracked yet
The primary problem is the concept of discovering such things has ossified and few people are experimenting on introducing new ones