This is true at every level of the systems design process - often by trying to make a system "simpler" i.e. less complex for the end user, the complexity is shifted further down the stack into application code, or even to the underlying infrastructure.
It's easy for those of us with technical backgrounds to see the beauty and simplicity in well designed interfaces, but as the realm of computing and computer interaction shifts away from technical to non-technical people, we start to absorb some of that complexity into our systems design to make up for knowledge shortcomings of end users.
Your example of sed being better than the "fancy data tools" I feel is a good one - whilst sed is incredibly powerful for this use case, if the consumer of what needs to be run there only knows how to use excel, it's often required to create these abstraction layers to allow the end user to do their own primary function/role.