I've also been through the wheel of complexity a few times and I think the problem is different: coming up with the right abstraction is hard and generations of people repeatedly make the same mistakes even though a good abstraction is possible.

Part of it comes from new generations not understanding the old technology well enough.

Part of it comes from the need to remake some of the most base assumptions, but nobody has the guts to redo Posix or change the abstractions available in libc. Everything these days is a layer or three of abstractions on top of unix primitives coming up with their own set of primitives.