I agree, and in fact I would consider working with junior developers a highlight of my day because there is an inherent virtue in the "beginners mind". And you're not wrong that juniors writing things that seem more complicated than they have any right to be producing is not a new thing. It's more that the patterns have skewed. Over a nearly 20 year career, I've developed pattern matching skills that can catch this kind of code...when produced by humans. It seems that I'll have to adjust my priors now. That's all.