When I first heard Dan Abramov talk about this I also recoiled a bit and was a bit offended. But the takeaway isn’t that abstraction is bad… it’s premature abstraction is bad. In fact just because it can be simplified does not mean the abstraction or simplification fits. Just because you can draw a circle around a common set of things does not mean that set is semantically significant. For example all humans have arms and legs, and you can make an abstraction encompassing those features, but it’s an incomplete abstraction if you miss the head or other features characteristic of an actual human. Before a domain is concrete a premature abstraction actually adds to technical debt.