It’s a nice metaphor, but hopefully we all know what bad abstractions look like. If you have to refer to the API documentation frequently, even for simple stuff, I don’t see how that’s adding any value. If you have 100 lines of code but you can expose the logic in 30 lines, that’s probably worth the refactor. However, making your code 3 lines instead of 10 isn’t very important.
Too, there's SO MUCH magic in it, that unless you work in it all day every day the abstractions take longer to remember that they're there and how to use them than it does to just write what they're doing "longhand".
I'm starting a new job with Rails and while there's a lot of magic there too, I don't get the same "how the $#! do I do this again" angst I got with Django. Maybe that's to your "bad abstraction" point.