Agree with this. Abstraction and design patterns when used in a well-thought out manner should make large or complex codebases easier to work with. And like yo

Agree with this. Abstraction and design patterns when used in a well-thought out manner should make large or complex codebases easier to work with. And like you, have experienced code bases that tried to throw every design pattern in the book at you, even for a relatively simple application, and made it a pain to work with. But have also seen them used carefully, in a standard company-wide usage that made all the code easier to understand - worked on a high-volume website with a large codebase, where they had micro-services that all used common 3-tier architecture, security-services, tooling... Really-well thought-out and you could work on any one of their ~100 microservices and already have a good understanding of its design, how to build and debug it, how its security worked, it's caching... Yeah, agreed, its how these techniques are used that determine if they are useful or just add complexity.