Yes, there's a valid argument that simple code is not always best performance. Optimizing simple code usually makes it more complex.

But I think the main point stands. There's an old saying that doing a 60 minute presentation is easy, doing one in 15 minutes us hard. In other words writing "clever" (complicated) code is easy. Distilling it down to something simple is hard.

So the final result of any coding might be "complex", "simplified from complex", or "optimized from simple".

The first and third iterations are superficially similar, although likely different in quality.