He was wrong up until we found the end of Moore's law. Now that hardware cannot get exponentially faster, we are forced to finally write good code. The kind that isn't afraid to touch bare metal. We don't need another level of abstraction. Abstraction does not help anyone. I would love to point to some good examples but it's still too early for this to be seen globally. Your 1000 container swarm for a calculator app is still state of the art infrastructure.