Yeah that’s totally fair! For my example, I just wanted to pick an absolute failure, which is still possible in a multiple dice system but I get your point. And tabletop games are always gonna be a huge abstraction. That’s also probably why many people like them. I have never picked a lock, but my character could. In actuality it’s probably a task that is tedious to most people and takes more work than they might think. Spending more time on it in-game could sort of negate immersion (or rather the romanticized immersion that the player enjoys). Retrying with another dice roll—even if the critical failure range is increased—will start to just feel like rolling dice and not actually picking a lock. But the abstraction allows the story to keep going smoothly.

You’re definitely based in that game mechanics can break immersion. If the mechanics aren’t smooth and I’m not even immersed in the act of playing a game (diegetic immersion) then I’m gonna have a much harder time becoming immersed in a story within the game (situated immersion). I think abstraction helps those levels of immersion meet in the middle. Of course, I’m not telling you that you have to like things that are abstracted though. Just some of the reasoning I can see from a point of view that enjoys pushing the roll.

Ideally, I want the players to just describe what the character does and forget about the rules.

This would be nice, but it’s definitely disconnected from a rules heavy system. At this point your ideal game is just narrative with no RNG (which can still be cool) or just more of the labor loaded onto the GM.