Indeed, innovation is far from being a linear process. It's actually messy, the breakthroughs already happened already and we describe it after the facts.

Or why it's important to deeply understand what you do and what you use. Cranking features and throwing code to the wall until it sticks will never lead to good engineering. Even if it's abstractions all the way, it's for convenience but don't treat them as black boxes.
Interestingly this article draws a parallel with organizations too. Isn't having very siloed teams the same as treating abstractions as black boxes?
Quite some food for thought here.

This is definitely a problem. It's doomed to influence how tech are chosen on software projects.

This will definitely push even more conservatism around the existing platforms. More articles mean more training data... The underdogs will then suffer.

This is another way to approach the question of having slack in your schedule. This is necessary, and probably at scale in the organization (as implied by this article).