Thoughts on "Cognitive load is what matters"

Reflections on Artem Zakirullin's article about cognitive load, complexity, refactoring and architectures.

In the article “Cognitive load is what matters” Artem Zakirullin gives a cognizant overview of the heart of building technical solutions which are maintainable over the long term, touching on the simple things like code complexity, inheritance and code obfuscation, code structures, service integrations and architecture, and how they all boil down to the same core thing - Cognitive Load is the distinguishing thing which matters most.

Cognitive load is what matters
There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let's focus on something more fundamental. What matters is the amount of confusion developers feel when going through the code.
minds.md

This isn’t a unique idea, it’s actually quite common - with all our desire to create beautiful technical solutions and perfect code structures, it’s easy to over-complexity and over-abstract our solutions, because it seems the correct thing to do at the time. The enlightened view is one that’s dealt with over-engineered and over-abstracted code structures, raged against it, and focuses on comprehensibility, even if that is counter-intuitive.