There's certainly a lot of accidental complexity that comes from lack of standardization. For example, think about how complicated character sets were to deal with before Unicode. Then compare the mess of different kinds of Unicode encodings to standardizing on UTF-8. Or take file formats before XML/JSON/Protobufs. Or, going further back, floating point before IEEE 754.
I agree that blowing it all up is not a win, which is why accidental complexity goes away only gradually, and it's partially a process of hiding it rather than removing it, with lots of politics along the way.
I agree that blowing it all up is not a win, which is why accidental complexity goes away only gradually, and it's partially a process of hiding it rather than removing it, with lots of politics along the way.