Actually, I have in fact seen this. I worked at a place where this copy and paste programming actually lead to functions that are many thousands of lines long a

Actually, I have in fact seen this. I worked at a place where this copy and paste programming actually lead to functions that are many thousands of lines long and are full of duplication and very deeply nested. At some point a file was split because the compiler would not handle such a large file (!). Very difficult to change anything. And also, refactoring by removing abstraction is fine as well. The thing that is not fine is having problems and doing nothing about them. To me it seem that is what the article ultimately encourages to do.