Think of the biology of the human body or practically any other industry. I've been out of college for about a decade and have moved roles several times at my company and I've only managed to learn a sliver of the complexity of my department. We have public documents that are thousands of pages long and that doesn't even get into the software. It's true that a much simpler solution exists like the industry did prior to computers, but it was probably an order of magnitude less efficient. Now we save large amounts of money at the expense of much higher complexity. You need a lot more people because each person can only specialize in a few things and has to abstract away the rest and trust that other co-workers are taking care of the other parts that you don't understand. It's frustrating, but I think most industries have this. Think of a nuclear power plant. There are hundreds of systems and processes. Is it even possible to learn them all in a single career past a bare minimum? What about outside the plant? The plant connects to the transmission grid which is operated by an entity and you have power marketers which sell your plant's output into a market which is operated by another organization running sophisticated software to optimize the region. There are several regulatory bodies involved from the NRC to the State Utility Commissions, to NERC & FERC that all have some regularory jurisdiction over you. Once your electricity gets on the distribution grid it is handled by utilities and so forth. The world is just insanely complex.
Could it be simpler? Yes, but there is an efficiency cost to that as well. Chuck Moore's chips are cool, but do they solve any current problems? If they were significantly better, people would be jumping on them. The reality is they're probably better for some niche uses. Certainly not enough to leave the confines of Windows or Linux with a traditional toolchain. Even without all the inertia it would be a tough sell. I don't know anything about complexity theory, but I imagine computer science is under the same rules as the rest of the universe. This also might be where Chesterton's Fence is relevant. We shouldn't argue to take down the fence when we don't know why it was put up to begin with.