> This is why some really good engineers are surprisingly okay with working in a sloppy codebase

No "really good engineer" ever enjoyed working with a sloppy code base, unless it was their sloppy code base, which is the only reason they pretend to understand it.

Source code is for humans, and "really good engineers" write source code so that other humans can read it.

Are you creating an asset, a liability, or just your own job security ?

Resonates well. Only it glosses over the detail that abstractions are often leaky and even increase global complexity for the goal of reducing local complexity of one component/layer. This is where the math example is misleading in relation to software engineering.