alt Hacker News> I would go as far as to say that any abstraction you can maintain (that is in active maintenance, I mean) is better than code duplication once you are passed a de minimis threshold.
Pretty much everyone arguing for duplication has argued what you are saying, which is wait to see a few instances of it before committing to an abstraction. No one is saying duplicate everything 100 times. So I don't think this discussion was ever iconoclastic.
The point is it sounds all smart and sophisticated and principled in the abstract environment of a code discussion in a blog post.
In the real world, duplication happens in an emergent way, there isn't the time each time to judge whether it's really time to just quietly abstract that code, you may not get the permission, budget or window to do it, and if you don't stop the rot really early you are locked into the pattern.