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It's the large-scale version of taking "DRY" too literally.

Junior devs just repeat themselves because they don't know better.

Middle devs rush into an incomplete abstraction by overzealously not-repeating-themselves.

Senior devs just repeat themselves because they know they don't understand what it would take to abstract out the solution.

Like everything... "It Depends". Don't Repeat Yourself Too Much.

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One thing to remember here is that a senior dev might be at the beginner stage for org wide changes.

Master devs avoid writing code at all costs. They've read Sun Tzu and understand that writing new code is just admitting defeat.

Part of the motivation behind DRY was to avoid the mess of repeating yourself within a task by updating 17 levels of classes and factories to add a field somewhere. This is mainly solved by using a sane language and not having useless intermediary code.

But you are right: applying DRY between tasks requires good judgement, and sometimes it's best to just copy some similar code around than to prematurely invent an abstraction.

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