I disagree. There are base abstractions you can’t avoid, of course, like the machine code of your computer, or the syscalls presented by it. Using these is not abstraction, unless you choose to build up interfaces of reusable pieces. Abstraction is structure. You still have to actually write some code that can be organized into structure. You could write code using just those base abstractions if you wanted, or as many do, choose libc as your base abstraction. Watching a program through strace gives you basically this view, regardless of the abstractions the program actually used to achieve the result.