[ubercode5]

In general I disagree. In large codebases you're going to have a number of abstractions that you'll have to deal with by their nature. Flattening these can cause a scenario where you have a long function with clusters of lines of code organized in a block are doing different functionality that isn't clearly stated. This may include a comment at the start of each block discussing what the next few lines are doing. And without abstraction, the functionality later may not be cleanly decoupled. Debugging these types of functions also adds significant mental load trying to see the forest through the trees.

From the article it seems like the bigger issue might be debugging style. For me, when debugging those abstracted functions should be treated and trusted as black boxes until you have sufficient reason that function is the issue, and then dig into it and ignore the rest of the function. Trying to build a mental model by effectively flattening every function takes huge cognitive load, and only is feasible for small amounts of code. Once the codebase is large enough it's going to become impossible to do this.