alt Hacker NewsPremature abstraction is one of the worst pitfalls when writing software. It's paid for up front, it costs developer time to understand and work with, it adds complexity (tech debt), increases likeliness of bugs, and increases refactor time. All for someone to say "if we ever want to do X". If we wanted to do it, we'd do it now.
I truly believe this comes from devs who want to feel smart by "architecting" solutions to future problems before those problems have become well defined.
I think it mostly happens because a little bit of abstraction is nearly always uncontroversially good. If you want to print a line of text 5 times, you'll instinctively write a for loop to do it, instead of copy-pasting the original print() statement an extra 4 times. The cognitive overhead upon reading this code is near zero, since we're all so familiar with it. This is abstraction, nonetheless.
So a little bit is always good, and more is sometimes very good -- even memorably good. Together these cause many of us to extrapolate too far, but for understandable reasons.