[goatlover]

Arguably reducing LOC helps maintainability, as long as it's done in a clear manner. That's one of the main points of abstraction, and all programming languages offer various abstraction facilities, unless it's a language like brainfuck.

[lacrimacida]

Depends how it’s done. And you can overabstract or do the wrong abstractions thinking you gained something from your cleverness but quite often all you’ve done is you obfuscated, reduced the maintainability for others and you got stuck with a steaming pile. I’ve seen quite a few fellows do this deliberatley in order to become harder to replace and it works somewhat. But said codebases don’t age too well