My thought exactly. At one point I even thought he might conclude with that despite a very semantically compressed solution he reverted to the original solutio

My thought exactly. At one point I even thought he might conclude with that despite a very semantically compressed solution he reverted to the original solution but with a minor twist and some lessons learned - would have been a lovely twist :) In this case it probably was very worth while since it was so commonly used. These kind of simplifications are often riddled with trade offs that you get better at identifying and making informed decisions about as you mature and gain experience. I do agree with pretty much everything written, though I do feel that it is hard to avoid writing bad code in the beginning (but we can certainly improve on it!).