I think you're missing the forest for the trees here somewhat. What I believe GP to mean is that rather than use written out names and data structure layouts t

I think you're missing the forest for the trees here somewhat. What I believe GP to mean is that rather than use written out names and data structure layouts that make code easy to digest for others on the team, some folks choose code that makes their personal mental models easy to construct. This can be extremely valuable, but is also very bespoke and difficult to maintain. I completely agree with your last point regardless: those kinds of arguments honestly held between well meaning team members are definitely a strong indicator that the implementation used is mismatching the use case at some level.