Cyclomatic complexity seems like a great example of Goodhart's Law [1]. I absolutely agree that on the whole, code with fewer paths tends to be easier to read.

Cyclomatic complexity seems like a great example of Goodhart's Law [1]. I absolutely agree that on the whole, code with fewer paths tends to be easier to read. However, taking deeply nested code and arbitrarily pulling chunks of it out into functions which only have a single caller and don't really abstract anything that's ever going to be terribly meaningful on its own seldom makes it better in my experience -- and can force a lot of skipping around if you're actually trying to understand what the system as a whole is trying to do. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law