The kind of application of DRY you describe is not what the author has a problem with. What you describe is totally reasonable. Have you never seen more junior

The kind of application of DRY you describe is not what the author has a problem with. What you describe is totally reasonable. Have you never seen more junior engineers make code 1000x worse (bordering on nonsensical), with them proudly saying they made it DRY-er? They are sometimes so focused on the one often-misapplied principle that they cannot reason about the produced code as a whole.