I think every talk on complexity is meaningless, without taking into account the difference between accidental and essential complexity.
There are problem domains where there is simply a minimal complexity required implicitly. You can’t write an insanely simple program that will render vector fonts, simply because the problem inherently has to have a fixed amount of complexity. Anything more (accidental complexity) is of course bad, and “clean” code or whatever should try to minimize its amount, but it is harmful in my view if we keep believing that it could be made simpler. One really bad example is this list: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/
There are problem domains where there is simply a minimal complexity required implicitly. You can’t write an insanely simple program that will render vector fonts, simply because the problem inherently has to have a fixed amount of complexity. Anything more (accidental complexity) is of course bad, and “clean” code or whatever should try to minimize its amount, but it is harmful in my view if we keep believing that it could be made simpler. One really bad example is this list: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/