I think “complexity has to live somewhere” is just the definition of essential complexity. “Accidental complexity is just essential complexity showing its age” makes no sense to me: accidental complexity is often the result of ignoring essential complexity (or using inadequate tools). One often finds that edge cases can be naturally handled by principled approaches that capture the essential complexity of a system (see: Paxos). The alternative is a naive, simplistic approach that ignores essential complexity and quickly accumulates accidental complexity in the form of workarounds for newly-discovered edge cases. In other words, most software systems.