This is not strictly true, and happens when complexity is needed for some of the simple lower level parts or due to the libraries and tools available changing o

This is not strictly true, and happens when complexity is needed for some of the simple lower level parts or due to the libraries and tools available changing over time. For example, lets say the 10x engineer wrote fast inverse square root [0]. Most people would look at the code and not understand what's going on. It requires a lot of domain knowledge but provided nice speeedups at the time. Is it more complicated than necessary for some problems? Absolutely. However when used frequently as originally intended that speedup allows for more compute to be spent on higher level components useful to the rest of the team. It would also be a pain to maintain for those unfamiliar with some of the details but can be well encapsulated into a simple function call in a math library. Thw other case this illustrates is that code evolves and a solution available now to make a system simpler may not have been available in the past. Today the same code for fast inverse square root is outdated in favor of hardware calls, so if observing the code now it is certainly over complicated for the solutions available at hand. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root