In four lines of code he's hidden a ton of complexity and can now completely avoid thinking about all the low-level garbage.

Markdown similarly hides (automates) all the details of how it generates HTML from source, and in exchange you give up control over (many) aspects of what the target HTML looks like.

My car abstracts away from me the details of fuel-air mixtures, gear shifting, battery recharging, and so forth.

In all of these cases if I want more control I can go get it. The point is that I don't _have_ to: I can drive the kids to school, document something in reasonably nice HTML, and get a damn window on the screen without having to think (as much) about it.