Cognitive load is what matters

I think it's pretty tiresome that "smart authors" are blamed for writing complex code. Smart authors generally write simpler code. It's much harder to write simple code than complex for reasons that boil down to entropy -- there are simply many more ways to write complex code than simple code, and finding one of the simple expressions of program logic requires both smarts and a modicum of experience.

If you try to do it algorithmically, you arguably won't find a simple expression. It's often glossed over how readability in one axis can drive complexities along another axis, especially when composing code into bite-size readable chunks the actual logic easily gets smeared across many (sometimes dozens) of different functions, making it very hard to figure out what it actually does, even though all the functions check all the boxes for readability, having a single responsibility, etc.

E.g. is userAuthorized(request) is true but why is it true? Well because usernamePresent(request) is true and passwordCorrect(user) is true, both of which also decompose into multiple functions and conditions. It's often a smaller cognitive load to just have all that logic in one place, even if it's not the local optimum of readability it may be the global one because needing to constantly skip between methods or modules to figure out what is happening is also incredibly taxing.

When an article like this uses the term "smart people", I'm always a bit confused if they mean actually smart people, or not-that-smart-people-who-think-highly-of-themselves. Because there's a lot more people in the latter category, and in my view they are the ones building unnecessary complexity into codebases.

To clarify, when I say "not-that-smart-people", I don't mean "stupid people". You need to be beyond some basic level of intelligence in order to have the capability to overcomplicate a codebase. For lack of a better metric, consider IQ. If your IQ is below 80, you are not going to work day-to-day overcomplicating a codebase. You need to be slightly above average intelligence (not stupid, but also "not-that-smart") to find yourself in that position.

It takes intelligence to see where to make a change though.

If you make a change at the wrong place, you add more complexity than if you put the change in the right place. You often see the same thing with junior developers, in that case due to a limited mental model of the code. You give them a task that from a senior developer would result in a 2 line diff and they come back changing 45 lines.