My specific concern is where it pushes that a big ball of mud is easy to write, but hard to maintain. I agree, but oddly, a ball of mud is also somewhat easier to delete. Such that, it is best to grow your code from that core and only grow to reusable parts if needed.

I encountered this at work recently. I fully agree that reusable and "single responsibility" is nice. However, to extract out 5 lines of code such that we now have 3 new classes and possibly a new dependency seems the opposite of the spirit here. If we ever got where that logic isn't needed, as is, you delete 5 lines of code. In the "abstracted out" world, you have to delete several classes, making sure nobody else had taken a dependency on it.

I get that counting by lines of code is not the best metric, but it is an easy one. And, in general good faith code, the lower that metric, the better. It is less to read. Less things connected together to reason about. And, less stuff that you could delete in the future if able.