The cost of maintaining two (or three ...) copies might well be less than creating an abstraction. The danger rather lies in situations where not everyone potentially modifying that code (now or later) is aware that there are N copies (and where they are) which need to be maintained.
To be fair, Sandi suggests adding dup tags (essentially comments with links to other duplicates, I guess) in the linked video.
I can see how this could work in some cases, but I remain skeptical about this technique. I have a strong gut feeling that over 20% of the junior engineers touching this code will not understand the dup tag and will end up modifying one case without keeping the other case in sync. This number is already high enough to be worrisome for me.
That's a big part of it for me. The abstraction would end up being the best way to document the duplication, imo. Far better than the likes of /* See also... */.
It depends of course, but I personally feel the work of 'simplifying an abstraction', is easier than the problem of 'tracking down anything that might need to be edited'.
