There are some contradictory claims here.

Boilerplate comes when your language doesn't have affordances, you get around this with /abstraction/ which leads to DSLs (Domain Specific Languages).

Matrix math is generally done on more than raw bits provided by digital circuits. Simple things like numbers require some amount of abstraction and indirection (pointers to memory addresses that begin arrays).

My point is yes, we've gotten ourselves in a complicated tar pit, but it's not because there wasn't a simpler solution lower in the stack.