The only thing that surprises me about both of those examples is that :state is a collection of things not just one thing, but I imagine if you're more familiar with their structures that would be less of an issue.
I just grabbed an example at random there. It's not really an excessive example of nesting, but, at the time I didn't grok threading.
I think the data being manipulated is a cloudformation response or something, so, the structure isn't something I'm in control of.
I actually changed it from `(:status (:status ...` in the original, which is even dumber naming, so that it wouldn't look like a typo. Real life programming is thoroughly unglamorous I guess.