I think the most tragic of all is that, based on my experiences in both startups and corporate cultures, most of that work people are killing themselves for is just "busywork" handed to them by managers who themselves don't know any better.
The amount of waste in human energy & effort in pointless jobs that optimise for "being busy" is, as far as 1st-world problems are concerned, a humanitarian tragedy.
your last sentence I think puts the 2nd pillar into the problem, which is not only technological (i.e. the abstraction problem mentioned in the original article) but also cultural