Yup, I also strongly disagree with the OP article. The most frustrating codebases I've dealt with are those with layers and layers of overly clever abstractions

Yup, I also strongly disagree with the OP article. The most frustrating codebases I've dealt with are those with layers and layers of overly clever abstractions, and over-engineered generalizations which will never be used before the code is refactored and rewritten. They are hard to understand, not well documented, difficult to test, and frustrating to debug. They often have tons of buggy edge-cases due to the combinatorial explosion of inputs, assumptions, and code paths. The older I get, the stronger I believe that simple is beautiful, and definitely not boring. Simple is often harder than complex.