I talk occasionally about viewing your code from the debugger but that is kind of hand wavy. I wonder if there’s a ‘linter’ one could write that looks at coverage or trace reports and complains about bad patterns.
The problem is, we have been adding layers of indirection for 80 years, and each is leaky. So now it's very difficult to do basic stuff, and people are ok with software thick with abstractions.
The next stage should be removing unnecessary layers of indirection, as, like you said, things are much easier to understand and maintain that way.
"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except for the problem of too many layers of indirection." -- David Wheeler
But we don't have 900 layers or anything. Performance is... usually pretty darn good, except for uneccessary disk writes.
It's trivial to do basic stuff because of those layers. What's hard is doing low level things from scratch in a way that doesn't conflict. But at the same time, there's less and less need for that.
I think things are way easier to maintain with a bunch of layers than the old school ravioli code. Most layers are specifically meant to make it easier to maintain, or they just formalize a layer that was already effectively there, but was built into another layer in an ad hoc manner.
Pasta-based metaphors are the best.
However there are all sorts of little subtle costs in your system that aren't captured by most of these tools due to lack of resolution (I haven't spent a lot of time with Intel's hardware solution) and asynchronous costs like memory defragmentation. Depth and frequency of calls are a useful proxy for figuring out what rocks to look under next after you've exhausted the first dozen. For this reason the flame graph is a useful fiction so I don't poo-poo them where anyone can hear. I can barely get people to look at perf data as it is.
But then I think how I'm turned off by some fictions and avoid certain fields, like parser writing, and wonder if a more accurate model would get more people to engage.