I think the point was to avoid the need for a bunch of copy paste by making the code simple to interact with in the first place. He isn't really advocating nev

I think the point was to avoid the need for a bunch of copy paste by making the code simple to interact with in the first place. He isn't really advocating never using helper methods either. In fact he gives an example where the helper methods hide some irrelevant values. If I were to rephrase it as "repeated code isn't necessarily bad in tests" does that make it more palatable?