In places I've worked DRY is overused, or used poorly. I can't count the number of times you get "DRY" on a code review just cause something appears twice. It's probably because it's the easiest one to spot.

> learning the acronyms like DRY, and just following them

Following DRY is the hard part. As the author points out, to DRY something up you need to pick the right level of abstraction. This requires experience to do well.