> I’m convinced there’s a contingent of devs who don’t like/grok abstraction.

I am one of those. I grok abstractions just fine (have commercially written idiomatically obtuse Scala and C#, some Haskell for fun, etc.), but I don't enjoy them.

I use them, of course (writing everything in raw asm is unproductive for most tasks), but rather than getting that warm fuzzy feeling most programmers seem to get when they finish writing a fancy clever abstraction and it works on the first try, I get it when I look at a piece of code I've written and realize there is nothing extraneous to take away, that it is efficient and readable in the sense of being explicit and clear, rather than hiding all the complexity away in order to look pretty or maximize more abstract concerns (reusability, DRY, etc.).

This mindset is a very good fit for writing compute-heavy numerical code, GPU stuff and lots of systems level code, not so much for being a cog in a large team on enterprise web backends, so I mostly write numerical code for physics simulations. You can write many other things this way and get very fast and bloatfree websites or anything else, but it doesn't work well in large teams or people using "industry best practices". It also makes me prefer C to Rust.