To add to this, I think that in the past decades, the rise of large software ecosystems (e.g. around Python, Java, Windows, AWS, Azure), have had both positive and negative effects on accidental complexity.
On the one hand libraries and platforms save developers from reimplementing common functionality. But on the other hand, they introduce new layers of accidental complexity through dependency management, version conflicts, rapid churn, and opaque toolchains.
This means that accidental complexity has not disappeared, it has only moved. Instead of being inside the code we write, it now lives in the ecosystems and tools we must manage. The result is a fragile foundation that often feels risky to depend on.
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