The real lesson is to learn low level details once and use it forever.
The advantage of abstractions that maintain backwards compatibility better than most (linux syscall, SQL, etc) is that they become low level in the sense of the above statement. There is absolutely no way most syscalls or SQL are actually low-level, but for the most part you can write your code as if they are.
Of course, these abstractions do leak, but for X% of usecases, they reduce the learning required to get the same output as you would have gotten with "true" low level knowledge.
The actual quality of the abstractions is completely moot, the backwards compat _alone_ means that their value exists at almost any value of X. See: the web platform, with a very low value of X.
This is why I love libraries and APIs that focus on backwards compat more than most. Everything else is unknown - you don't know how high quality your API is and how it will stand the test of time. But one thing is for sure, a backwards compatible API will _always_ be useful in some capacity.
The advantage of abstractions that maintain backwards compatibility better than most (linux syscall, SQL, etc) is that they become low level in the sense of the above statement. There is absolutely no way most syscalls or SQL are actually low-level, but for the most part you can write your code as if they are.
Of course, these abstractions do leak, but for X% of usecases, they reduce the learning required to get the same output as you would have gotten with "true" low level knowledge.
The actual quality of the abstractions is completely moot, the backwards compat _alone_ means that their value exists at almost any value of X. See: the web platform, with a very low value of X.
This is why I love libraries and APIs that focus on backwards compat more than most. Everything else is unknown - you don't know how high quality your API is and how it will stand the test of time. But one thing is for sure, a backwards compatible API will _always_ be useful in some capacity.