The difficulty in our current culture with abstraction mostly derives from taking "don't repeat yourself" too far and using that to mean "apply any compression

The difficulty in our current culture with abstraction mostly derives from taking "don't repeat yourself" too far and using that to mean "apply any compression strategy you can find to this code" which could range from enterprise generalization and configuration to APL-style code-golfing. A gentler, more helpful admonition would be "find the theme, reuse the theme". If you only set out to compress the code you obscure the theme of the code, but if you set out to elevate the theme as you find it, you are likely to let more code rest in a form that is duplicated but a reasonable reflection of the themes currently present.