His just circles the problem i think. It is a symptom of programmers not taking responsibillity for their own code. To cover your ass in the best possible way you have to write as little code as possible and that is what happens when a person sees a function that sor of doeas what they want. For some reason we think this is deduplicating code and it is good. But at least I have never been taught this in scool or by anyone in my work. We should treat it for what it is: an antipattern used by programmers to avoid taking responisbility. Another side to this coin is some times the «enablers» who create unneccesary abstractions. These are people who play at being livrary designers when they sre supposed to be developing applications as fast and safely as possible. The people who creates complex tools and unneccessary integrations inside the application code they write. Now, we are all risk averse and enablers to different degrees and at different times. To counteract these antipatterns i think it is important that we teach a few things: that functions/method should have a single purpose, if ou have a boolean argument and a if you should refactor. Rabbit theory of code. And at a higher level: always keep the focus on the business requirement and do codt brnefit analysis (light wieght in our head). And take time to learn the domain and tools you are working with. This also requires experience. But if we focus more on teaching people to learn sbout these things i think it may improve things