[hoppp]

My first thought was to rewrite it without any or and operation. just return early from if statement.

If user is blacklisted return access denied; If account is expired return access denied; If no conditions match return access granted;

Wouldn't that be more effective?

[ChilledTonic]

You are touching on an inherent truth in TFL, which is that there are nearly infinite equivalent statements for any logical sentence.

The idea for the article was to make a real example of logical equivalence, as books on the subject stay pretty abstract. - like others have mentioned, in the real world there are smarter choices to be made.