I've found that this is true particularly when working in OO styled languages --- there seems to be an innate desire to minimise microcomplexity at the expense of greatly increasing macrocomplexity. It's like writing a book where each page contains one word. Each individual piece is "simple", but taken as a whole it's much more difficult to understand.

I like this analogy: it's like writing about a difficult or nuanced subject using only "simple English"; each sentence is superficially simple, but the work as a whole is much more difficult to make sense of.