> "DRY would say we should combine these together" - "Yeah, but Single Responsibility; while the code is mostly the same, they fundamentally are dealing with different things in different contexts"

As originally coined, DRY speaks of ensuring every piece of knowledge is encoded once. If pieces of code are "dealing with different things" then those are two pieces of knowledge, and DRY (per that formulation) does not recommend combining them.

I agree that there is a prevalent notion of DRY that is more syntactic, but I find that version substantially less useful and so I try (as here) to push back on it. Rather than improving code, it's compressing it; I've joked that we should call it "Huffman coding" when someone tries to collapse unrelated things in ways that will be unmaintainable.

Note that it's not just that syntactic DRY sometimes goes to far - it also misses opportunities where the original DRY would recommend finding ways to collapse things: if I'm saying "there's a button here" in my HTML and in my JS and in my CSS, then I'm saying the same thing in three places (even though they look nothing alike) and maybe I should find a way to consolidate.

There are, of course, still tradeoffs - maybe the technology to unify the description isn't available, maybe deepening my tech stack makes things less inspectable, &c.