I love what you're saying. But, I've met a lot of people who have say 10-20 years experience designing applications with unnecessary and sometimes incredible cognitive load. There are serious incentives to NOT write "simple" code, let me share a few of them.
Root causes from my perspective look like:
1. Job security type development. Fearful/insecure developers make serious puzzle boxes. "Oh yea wait until they fire me and see how much they need me, I'm the only one who can do this."
2. Working in a vacuum/black hole developers. Red flags are phrases like "snark I could have done this" when working together on a feature with them. Yes, that is exactly the point, and I even hope the junior comes in after and can build off of it too.
3. Mixing work with play "I read this blog post about category theory and found this great way to conceptualize my code through various abstractions that actually deter from runtime performance but sound really cool when we talk about it at lunch".
4. Clout/resume/ego chasing "I want to say something smart at stand up, a conference, or at a future job, so other people know they are not on my level and cannot touch my code or achieve my quality."
Some other red flags. They alone maintain their "pet" projects for everything serious until they couldn't. Minor problems/changes come up, someone else goes in and fixes it. Something serious happens it's a stop the world garbage collection for that developer and they are the only one who can fix it disrupting any other operations they were part of.
I agree with everything you're saying, but these are different issues - not symptoms of excess intellect. Just post-hoc rationalization of poor choices.
Root causes from my perspective look like: 1. Job security type development. Fearful/insecure developers make serious puzzle boxes. "Oh yea wait until they fire me and see how much they need me, I'm the only one who can do this."
2. Working in a vacuum/black hole developers. Red flags are phrases like "snark I could have done this" when working together on a feature with them. Yes, that is exactly the point, and I even hope the junior comes in after and can build off of it too.
3. Mixing work with play "I read this blog post about category theory and found this great way to conceptualize my code through various abstractions that actually deter from runtime performance but sound really cool when we talk about it at lunch".
4. Clout/resume/ego chasing "I want to say something smart at stand up, a conference, or at a future job, so other people know they are not on my level and cannot touch my code or achieve my quality."
Some other red flags. They alone maintain their "pet" projects for everything serious until they couldn't. Minor problems/changes come up, someone else goes in and fixes it. Something serious happens it's a stop the world garbage collection for that developer and they are the only one who can fix it disrupting any other operations they were part of.