The efficiency argument I accept, it's surely one main driver why systems tend to form and centralize and one important factor in the balance. Still, one can observe the weird things humans and AIs do when trying to dance around the gaps in leaky abstractions. So there's a tradeoff between (the effort spent on) that, and dropping the abstraction completely, as soon as the abstraction stops being a necessary constraint (due to the limited capacity of a human brain).