> it's worth asking whether lots of relatively straightforward verbose code is actually significantly worse than the least code necessary for the problem.

The question is wrong because reality isn't binary. "We've" never aimed for minimal, except maybe in the very early days or some real edge cases

If you're writing the minimal code you're either writing something very compact/simple[0], or you're wasting too much time and not balancing things.

If you're rewriting everything then you're wasting too much time and introducing too much complexity[1].

You can't write good code by slapping together a bunch of libraries but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use libraries either.

[0] "simple" is an overloaded term. If you're upset by me saying "simple", I'm using the other definition

[1] sed -i [0] "s/simple/complex/g"