The last published novel of Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (1893 for the second volume), contains a passage that explains that a high level of detail is not necessarily what you want from a model. I quote it in full:

“What a useful thing a pocket-map is!” I remarked.

“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”

“About six inches to the mile.”

“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

“Have you used it much?” I enquired.

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

In other words: if the model is nearly as complex as the thing it applies to, then it is no more useful than the thing itself. This theme also appears in a 1945 essay by Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener, “The Role of Models in Science”:

“The best material model for a cat is another, or preferably the same cat. In other words, should a material model thoroughly realize its purpose, the original situation could be grasped in its entirety and a model would be unnecessary. […] This ideal theoretical model cannot probably be achieved. Partial models, imperfect as they may be, are the only means developed by science for understanding the universe. This statement does not imply an attitude of defeatism but the recognition that the main tool of science is the human mind and that the human mind is finite.”

The last sentence is the most important: a model is not something that is meant to mimic reality; it is something that is constructed by and for the human mind to help it grasp complex aspects of reality.