Completely agree with this. It took me 7-8 years of professional development before I fully realised that I needed to stop being clever without a really good reason.
A really good reason would be to significantly improve performance or reduce a maintainence burden (e.g. loads of duplication). A good reason would not be "elegance" or an abstraction which might be useful one day.
One of things I loathe about code review is fighting for simplicity against people who haven't figured it out yet.
If you look at golang... It's entire purpose for existing(in my opinion) was google realized it had too many people who couldn't be trusted to write maintainable code with all of the flexibility of most programming languages. And yes, google hires many of the best and brightest, and yep go lang is still flourishing despite being an objectively rough language.
I'm with you though. I don't like reviewing a lot of code because it sucks calling out a simpler approach to someone who is clearly trying to showcase their greatness. Can put mid level engineers who know better in a crappy spot.
A really good reason would be to significantly improve performance or reduce a maintainence burden (e.g. loads of duplication). A good reason would not be "elegance" or an abstraction which might be useful one day.
One of things I loathe about code review is fighting for simplicity against people who haven't figured it out yet.