OK, look back at the original picture this thread is based on.

We have two situations.

The first is a dedicated system for providing navigation and other subsystems for a very specific purpose, with very specific hardware that is very limited. An 8 bit CPU with a very clearly known RISCesque instruction set, 4kb of ram and an bus to connect devices.

The second is a modern computer system with unknown hardware, one of many CPUs offering the same instruction set, but with differing extensions, a lot of memory attached.

You are going to write software very differently for these two systems. You cannot realistically abstract on the first system, in reality you can't even use libraries directly. Maybe you can borrow code from a library at best. On the second system you MUST abstract because, you don't know if the target system will run an Intel or Amd CPU, what the GPU might be, what other hardware is in place, etc etc.

And this is why my original comment was saying, you just cannot compare these systems. One MUST use abstraction, the other must not. And abstractions DO produce overhead (which is an inefficiency). But we NEED that and it's not a bad thing.