Maybe.

OK, I grasp what the author is getting at -- there are certainly times when I've gone needlessly complex expecting a set of problems that not only never materialized, but the ones that actually materialized were poorly handled by my design. It sucks. Lesson learned.

I only have first-person anec-data based on a diverse career in software development (big/small/solo/small/big team/process-heavy/haphazard) but it's the opposite circumstance that usually burns me far worse.

I describe this as "they asked for this really small thing and now it runs half the company" problem. It's an exaggeration, but the story from my past was the temporary system that was set up for an (unnamed) major long-distance carrier to "pay the bill via an EDI setup"[1]. Ten years later, shortly after we moved a huge data-center to another time zone the panic alarm bells rang over a few million dollars missing from said carrier.

The temporary-turned-permanent setup was an IBM NetVista machine hooked up to a 1200 baud modem with a dedicated phone line running a DOS program at boot off of a hard drive that had to have its disk parameters manually provided via BIOS every reboot because the little battery inside had sent its last electron down the line and -- rather than replace the battery with an abundance of spares -- the technician decided printing a label with the values would suffice.

A more apt example would be a dashboard that I created a simple service for which produced a list of "the top 20 endpoint threats by vulnerability patching level" ... oh did the execs love this[2], which led to creating a mess of other dashboards and a set of small services that produced just the hostnames. They were all variations like "Just locations with desktop support staff on-site by location", "Servers", "Domain Controllers" ... I want to say I had something like 30 variations at the end ... and thousands of lines of code. I wasn't clever. This "stupid service" took me away from things I needed to finish and several others that I enjoyed working on much more, so this was a model of spaghetti-code-copy-pasta(-marinara). And then they wanted something added to the output of everything. I finished it a few days before leaving the department ... along the way I figured out that more than half of the reports produced results that were anywhere from "kind of close" to what they said they did to several which produced results for the wrong building for each endpoint type (and -- as a result -- was completely ignored). I bit the bullet and took this 5,000 multi-file ASP (vbscript!) monster down to 6-ish classes, less than 500 lines, easy to extend/expand and re-use what's there[3].

Unfortunately, this leads to the totally useless advice of "Be Clever When It Will Help." When will it help? Beats the hell out of me. I didn't imagine a world where a VP calling my desk asking for "a quick web page that shows the worst machines on the network for a slide I'm working on" would become an integral reporting component of an in-house massive networking auditing tool, so I can't help much, there...

[0] Admittedly, I only discovered I encountered the opposite circumstance after that circumstance presented itself, so the whole thing benefited from hindsight bias.

[1] I was not directly involved in the software involved, only in the resurrection of the dead service.

[2] I had the dubious distinction of accidentally creating "a new operations process" whereby every week it was expected that the top 20 machines on Monday (...which became "from each list"...) would be fully resolved by Friday. Desktop had to have dolls in my shape with knives sticking out of them.

[3] Demonstrated on the final revision by adding a single class that altered the retrieval process to WeakReference cache all views (there were reasons an output cache wasn't useful due to it now being part of a bigger system that often required previously materialized values on other threads but never touched an HTTP endpoint).