Comment by bonoboTP

Abstractions can certainly enable this kind of "telescoping" effect of understanding, but not everything can be compressed with clever abstractions. Some things are inherently incompressible and there is no neat and insightful short explanation for why it is true, just a massive proof, but it may still have provably good properties for building a chip or power plant.

We have naturally only explored the mathematical universe in the parts where telescoping via clever abstractions can get us. But there is much more. Being able to juggle more things in your mind at the same time can have qualitatively massive benefits.

Information theory and proof theory, algorithmic information theory etc has of course explored this.