That's a totally different domain, where abstractions are most likely for the better. The bad part is the abstractions at places where they're not wanted e.g. graphics and other high performance systems programming. Abstractions are fine if you can opt out, but don't take away the control from those who need it.
The same fundamental equation applies to both domains:
Software engineering hours are expensive and hardware is cheap.
I just ordered a video card with 24 gig of ram. Well, calling it a video card is not quite right as it's a K80 Nvidia HPC cards, but as a software engineer working on a team of 5 computer vision/R&D guys and two software engineers, I can tell you that I do not want to live in a world where I have to fix code written by researchers that's juggling around vram and managing 4,992 threads. I'd much rather have that abstracted and have a clean API that hides the complexity.
And in terms of performance, you do not have to spend many man-days trying to debug some horrendous pile of code brought on by the complexity of exposing every tweakable bit of a architecture in order to exceed the cost of X addition $5000 HPC cards running less performant but far less complex code.
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather write a simple web service application in python than in assembly.