I think what people are taking exception to, is the difference between abstraction users (programmers who are writing concurrent code) who should be able to use high level concurrency idioms to hide their shared state and abstraction creators (programmers who are writing high level concurrency idioms) who need concurrency primitives to make their abstractions efficient.

If we didn't have concurrency primitives, the only high level concurrency idioms we would have would be the ones that made it into the JVM, which is a very slow process.