If someone is interested in further contemplation around this, I highly recommend the book "A philosophy of software design" by John Ousterhout. In my opinion,

If someone is interested in further contemplation around this, I highly recommend the book "A philosophy of software design" by John Ousterhout. In my opinion, it gives good reasoning why clean code is sometimes praised and sometimes criticised like it is here. I highly agree with Ousterhout that software complexity is mostly caused by obscurity and (cognitive) dependencies within abstractions. With that in mind its easier to see why Dan failed to improve the code here.