One more thing: some people have no eye for aesthetics. I’ve seen (smart) people defend a piece of code, and when I show them a refactored version, they say “that’s literally the exact same thing I wrote.”

No it’s not, and yes it is, in the sense that’s a^2 + 2ab + c^2 is not the same thing as (a+b)^2, but they (should and ideally must) evaluate to the same thing. I say ideally because only in the case of using infinite precision arithmetic can you guarantee this for all values of a,b,c.

People blind to these patterns cannot see how to simplify things, whether math or code or UIs.