I find this problem to be overblown. I've met dozens of dirty coders who happily copy-paste code without a single thought for maintainability and their colleagues. I've yet to meet a single clean code zealot.

It's impossible to tell from this example (because no actual code is included) whether refactoring the code was a bad idea or whether it was this specific implementation which was wrong. Clearly the math should sit in a geometry/linear algebra libraries and nowhere near the presentation layers.