Based on the complete out of my behind number I'd say something like 99.9999% of successful hacks I read about use one level of abstraction or less. Heavy emphasis on the less.
So I think one layer of abstraction will get you pretty far with most targets.
If anything, the pattern of the obfuscated code is a red flag for both human and LLM readers (although of course the LLM will read much faster). You don't have to figure out what it does to know it's suspicious (although LLMs are better at that than I would have expected, and humans have a variety of techniques available to them).
So I think one layer of abstraction will get you pretty far with most targets.