[henrikn]

Also glanced at the load_from_v1 code.

I can't argue with the "deprecated code" bit – if you never need to understand or edit that code again, by all means leave it. There will be no payoff for spending time reducing the complexity.

But "splitting into multiple methods only complicates the logic flow" sounds less like Code Climate being wrong and more like you not having found good refactoring techniques, maybe.

I see several things that I think have a good chance of helping readability: extracting the whole thing to an object, then replacing the inline error handling with an error handling method ("begin" is a smell), extracting (and naming) whatever happens on each iteration of the "data" and so on.