Sometimes the new magic incantation is longer than the old incantations it was based on, though. And slower. And harder to understand. And buggier. And doesn't expose important functionality, so you invent roundabout ways to access it. And when you put several abstractions on top of each other, you will eventually get all these problems combined.

For example, try to draw a single black pixel on the screen... using JavaScript, or better yet, some language that compiles to JavaScript. How long would that take you? How many lines of code? How fast does it run? How much memory used by all subsystems combined? How many system calls involved? In assembly language that would be one instruction. And don't tell me that drawing single pixels is unimportant. I can show you any number of hackers who would create extremely cool webapps if drawing a pixel took one assembly instruction.