> That said, I do like the idea of reducing abstraction layers, getting closer to the hardware,

Abstraction is THE tool to curb complexity. It's a feature that allows us to design, reason about, build, debug, maintain and extend systems with the complexity of todays computers. Reducing abstraction is in itself not a desirable goal.

What could be useful is to reduce the overhead introduced by abstraction. Doing that by removing the abstraction itself is only one such way and a quite costly alternative.