If you look at what happens with Refactoring or Unit testing, instead of just listening to what people tell you is happening, you see that a lot of goes on is synthesizing one state from a small group of others, over and over again.

So for instance there may be five different criteria that decide whether you are qualified to receive a 10% off discount. You make a block of code that is responsible for emitting a single boolean, and the rest of the system only ever interacts with that single value.

Instead of an upper bound of 2^n you have one that is somewhere around n/3 factorial. Which is still a scary-big number, but might push out the dog leg a couple of years.