In his "Power of Simplicity"[1] talk, Alan Kay had a great illustration of this specific phenomenon using astronomy:

Before Johannes Kepler had the insight of describing the orbits of the planets with ellipsis, peoples were using the (conceptually simpler) circles which didn't completely match the observed movement of celestial body such as Mars, thus resulted in complicated circle-within-circles orbits to try to model reality. By introducing a more complex basic shape (ellipsis instead of circle) which happened to match the underlying reality more, the overall description of orbits got greatly simplified.

It's a phenomenon I've seen a few time in my career so far: that while often there's complex code because there are actually complex hedge case to handle (essential complexity), sometime it's really because the data structure used to model the thing you're handling is slightly missing the mark, making things fit almost-but-not-quite, and many operation done around to handle data can be greatly simplified (if not avoided altogether) by changing the underlying data-structure.

(Also, Alan Kay apparently did another talk called "Is it really complex, or did we just make it complicated"[2] that seems pertinent to the thread, though I haven't watch it yet)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY