Some devs did find it a code smell... But each scope had a clear short high level comment describing what it did, there were end to end tests for the method, and very little state flowed from scope to scope (some did) - because that's what scoprs do... Prevent variables from leaking.

My point is the code smell isn't always accurate, and there are times and even for 2000 line monsters other devs agreed that there, it was the best way to hide complexity away from the rest of the codebase. If we ever needed to factor things out (we never did), we could spend some effort and do it.