I think the design of a wiring harness is actually a good analogy for a well-created API, in that it provides a handful of endpoints, each of which fulfills a "contract". On modern wiring harnesses, it's pretty hard to connect the wrong thing, because the connectors are physically "typed", in that the male and female sides are uniquely shaped so only they will mate up, rather than having a generic connector that plugs in to every sensor.
On the contrary, twisting a distributor to set timing, or doing _anything_ on a carburator, will make you long for those aspects of ICE to be abstracted to control by software. Weirdly enough, that's what's happened over time in cars with direct injection controlled by ECUs.
Obviously it's nostalgia for me, but timing lights, distributors, points, carburetor ports and butterfly valves, you could really see into the mechanisms. Hell, my dad (who was a master mechanic and worked on cars and railroad diesel engines to put himself through college) took a drill to the fuel injectors on a shitty 80s Chrysler engine that was knocking and stalling when cold (no amount of adjusting the choke could fix it). I drove that POS in my college years and never had a problem with it.
If you're doing minimally invasive wrenching on stuff that is in good condition electronics are fine until you have to do serious work to them.
Grafting two engine harnesses together because you can't buy the one you need (because nobody sells that stuff for 20+yo vehicles) will make you want a carburetor.
On the contrary, twisting a distributor to set timing, or doing _anything_ on a carburator, will make you long for those aspects of ICE to be abstracted to control by software. Weirdly enough, that's what's happened over time in cars with direct injection controlled by ECUs.