I don't know, I'm seduced by the elitist approach: code with a high cognitive load keeps mediocre developers away.
Case in point: Forth. It generally has a heavy cognitive load. However, Forth also enables a radical kind of simplicity. You need to be able to handle the load to access it.
The mind can train to a high cognitive load. It's a nice "muscle" to train.
Should we care about cognitive load? Absolutely. It's a finite budget. But I also think that there are legitimate reasons to accept a high cognitive load for a piece of code.
One might ask "what if you need to onboard mediocre developers into your project?". Hum, yeah, sure. In that case, this article is correct. But being forced to onboard mediocre developers highlights an organizational problem.
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