World is full of abstractions on many different levels. Something being on a lower level doesn't inherently mean superior. You can go in any direction on the scale or spectrum. Do you know how exactly atoms behave that computers are made out of? There are plenty of people working on all different sorts of abstractions, new abstractions appear and demand for lower level increases when it is needed. You could say that as more abstractions are built on top of lower level the balance of all the field will go higher in abstraction level on average, but that is the natural way to evolve. Abstractions allow you to build faster and the abstractions are possible because of lower level elements. In the end if you are measuring what an average level of abstraction for current industry is you can draw the line arbitrarily. You could include the people who use website builders and you can calculate the average to be even higher. We need people working on at all different levels of abstraction. We could divide the groups with 2 different naming convention for lower level engineers and higher level, then technically you could go back to calculating that average is still where it used to be.

I definitely use npm (or rather pnpm) because I know it will allow me to build whatever I want much faster.