This sounds like elitism in disguise to me.

Sure, there are some cases when you want quick and dirty and just glue some system together, but most production code out there has some more important business requirement than "understandable by the cheapest engineers out there".

For instance, if you're writing an account management system for a regional bank, you'll care most about the accuracy and longevity (including easy maintainability) of the system.

If you're writing a microservice for a fancy web app with global distribution you might care about latency (high latency drives down CVR), reliability (errors drive down sales and ads too) and sustained agility (you need to develop features fast to keep ahead of competition).

I think the second example covers most of what web and mobile developers do. I've definitely seen cases of over-engineered systems with many layers of leaky abstractions, but also many cases of under-engineered systems. Here are some well-documented maladies:

1. RYE (Repeat Yourself Everywhere) - You have the same business logic repeated in multiple places, because originally it didn't seem common enough or large enough to warrant DRYing up. This is obviously easier to read, since you don't need to dive deeper into more functions, but in practice the shared logic quickly diverges between the different cases, until it's very hard to specify what your system does.

2. "Let's just add an if branch here for this special case" - quick and dirty, as unclever as it can be, until you realize you need to deal with the combined permutations of 20 different branches. This is readable only in the very surface sense.

3. "Our junior engineers understand for loops better than map-filter-reduce chains, so let's use for loops instead of spending a few days teaching them": You can replace "for loops" with anything else that your junior engineers happen to know. The end result is not avoiding an over-engineered or "too clever" solution, but rather just avoiding a solution that is often simpler and easier to understand but just happens to be unfamiliar to your engineer. See also "blub paradox".

4. "This 500-line function is brain-dead simple and uses no fancy tricks". Likewise, it's easier for a junior engineer to write long-winded code and avoid thinking about even the simplest abstractions. And the code works! This doesn't make the code more maintainable or reliable though.

5. "Let's add ad-hoc retry with for loops and branches when necessary instead of creating an abstraction based on closures or let alone monads - this is just too clever". End result: reliability is added only after somebody complains about a certain functionality instead of being designed and baked into the service, and your service suffers accordingly.

There are many more examples, but the general gist is that in almost every corner of our industry there are important concerns that require us to take our engineering practice seriously. I think statements like "It's all just glue code", "It's all just plumbing" or "It's just a CRUD app" are not constructive for quality.

I wholly agree with you about simplifying things. I just think we should be mindful of the difference between "simple" and "easy" (as Rich Hickey famously put it[1]). What is easy for a junior developer to understand (because it doesn't contain any concept they haven't learned yet) may increase the absolute complexity. If you choose the "easy" solution here, you make the code seem _subjectively_ simpler to junior developers, at the price of _objectively_ (and measurably!) increasing cyclomatic, cognitive or state complexity.

Unless the "clever solution" requires understanding that is beyond what we can expect the reasonable average engineer to learn quickly, I prefer to always err on the side of reducing absolute complexity, and code that is simpler to read _for senior engineers_.

[1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/