I've seen this logic about choosing a library but I think you are attributing a different rationale to it. I've seen it said if you find more than one library doing what you need, go through a hierarchy of criteria to choose and choose the first one that wins; in the event of a tie, evaluate the next point

1. pick the one with the most readable, understandable architecture 2. choose the one that focuses more on what you are looking for and not a slew of different things 3. choose the one with fewer lines of code

This third point is not "choose the more clever library" but more along the lines of choose the more straight forward and simple library. It's not code density you are evaluating but focus.