In my experience the more familiar that someone is with the code, the more they think pushing code into smaller functions is the correct path. They have already built up a mental model of the code at hand, so the cleanest implementation to them is one with very few lines.
But the next person to come along has to bounce back and forth, performing mental stack push/pop operations to create the same mental model which is much harder to do when you don't have any of the original context
But the next person to come along has to bounce back and forth, performing mental stack push/pop operations to create the same mental model which is much harder to do when you don't have any of the original context