Overuse of anything is generally harmful (since it suggests doing too much of it) otherwise it would just be use! But I'm fairly convinced the author isn't say

Overuse of anything is generally harmful (since it suggests doing too much of it) otherwise it would just be use! But I'm fairly convinced the author isn't saying that they are to be generally avoided, to quote directly: > If statements usually make your code more complicated. But we don’t want to outright ban them. I’ve seen some pretty heinous code created with the goal of removing all traces of if statements. We want to avoid falling into that trap.