It's interesting that this person is basically an extreme version of something that happens all the time in this industry. I've seen so much premature optimisa

It's interesting that this person is basically an extreme version of something that happens all the time in this industry. I've seen so much premature optimisation / abstraction on virtually every project I've worked on. The people that do this stuff are often very persuasive, and it can be hard to be the person who suggests the "dumb" alternative. Often their arguments are actually correct, e.g. "we need to do this thing to make it more maintainable / scalable", it's just that in so many cases, the project is never going to be maintained or scaled.