I agree with you because you said overuse - but I wanted to reinforce that this is statement reads: "It's a bad idea when it's a bad idea" which isn't super hel

I agree with you because you said overuse - but I wanted to reinforce that this is statement reads: "It's a bad idea when it's a bad idea" which isn't super helpful and might give the impression that abstraction is usually the bad option. There are very very few times when I've seen the correct answer between abstracting code and leaving it as-is being leaving it as-is when a good abstraction is possible - but I've also seen a lot of incorrect misaligned abstractions that abstract functionality that coincidentally looks the same (i.e. sharing similar business rules as an origin) but is actually quite different. If you're calculating the final price on a transaction and that item could be either a donut with a 5% food tax or a t-shirt with a 5% sales tax it's not appropriate to abstract taxes to be 5% - they're different taxes and just because they happen to be the same number making them reference the same logic block or constant is a Bad Idea(tm). Abstraction is (generally) an investment in the long term health of your system, whether you, the dev, can justify the costs to higher ups or not is usually a pretty big part of the question. But, if there are legitimately abstractable things you can abstract please do abstract them (and add tests over everything).