Comment by time4tea

You dont know immediately if something that superficially seems the same actually is.

Copy and paste once is fine, twice, not so much.

Often I've seen two totally different things exist in one bit of code, no overlap!

Premature generification is bad, and leads the developer to believe that two things are the same, making it harder to see they are not.

Also, can make it much harder to see that a different abstraction would give a cleaner outcome....