You're right, over-abstracting is a primary risk and has been top of mind for us since project conception in ~2012. ORM, for example, is a nightmare of over-abstraction (remember Spring Framework's AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean?). In fact, studying the O/R impedance mismatch from first principles back in ~2010 was what led me to functional programming in 2011.
Electric is an attempt to find exactly the right level of abstraction. The goal is to remove and flatten layers, not add them, thus decreasing abstraction weight in the end if we succeed. Maybe we fail, but first let me share some details about how we think about this:
1. I've personally failed to build this project several times, Electric Clojure is something like the 7th attempt.
2. strong composition model as a starting point, based on category theory generalization of "function" -> "async function" -> "reactive function" -> "stream function" -> "distributed function". ORM does not have this. (This rigor is in response to the past failures.)
3. Functional effect system (monad stuff) at the bottom, which provides strong semantics guarantees about glitch-free reactive propagation, process supervision (like Erlang) (transparent propagation of cancellation and failure), strong resource cleanup guarantees (DOM nodes can never be left hanging, event handlers can never fail to be detached and disposed). Already this results in tighter operational semantics than we have ever achieved with manual resource management (and, again, we tried, see past failures). Our functional effects library: https://github.com/leonoel/missionary
4. Electric affords the programmer trapdoors to the underlying FRP/concurrency primitives. Electric is essentially a Clojure-to-FRP compiler, so if you code raw concurrency and effect management, that actually typechecks with what Electric generates, allowing seamless transition in and out of the abstraction.
5. 3k LOC + 3k test LOC is the size of Electric today (includes a rewrite of the Clojure analyzer). Spring Framework is, let me go check, 59k just for `spring-core/src/main/java`, and there are like 20 other modules I excluded. Indeed it is not a fair comparison but certainly we have complexity budget to spare.