Clean Code sounds like a virtue, but it wasn't ever supposed to be a primary goal, it's more about disciplined with the code you write. Architecture and Design

Clean Code sounds like a virtue, but it wasn't ever supposed to be a primary goal, it's more about disciplined with the code you write. Architecture and Design are more fundamental. Removing duplication is most often about Design. Very easy to introduce unintended coupling if the only motivation is to reduce duplication. Coupling, Cohesion, Composition, and Abstraction are generally more important concerns than clean code. Sometimes simply by trying to remove duplication you find a better design, but sometimes you don't, sometimes you tangle your design with couplings that don't really make sense. However, after your higher concerns are taken care of, you should keep the code clean. As a sidenote, what the author did by going to extremes and then backing out of it is actually a really good exercise in learning some of this stuff. We are fond of our "rules" for producing good software, they often encapsulate key insights. But there are no real rules, there's just the vast interacting world of these insights and how they play off against each other and how we socially interact with others with often similar but slightly different insights to create software as groups. It can be done many ways and should be a constantly evolving thing.