> [...] well, probably not with this tiny example, but I hope you know what I mean [...]
Well, here's the thing. These small pieces of code DO show up in actual, real codebases! I've gotten feedback during code reviews along the lines of, "What if the surrounding context is refactored, this tiny, simple piece code could break" and to be perfectly honest, when I get it, I come down to your desk and we have a discussion about whether that kind of feedback is appropriate, and the purpose of code reviews.
(It also always seems like the issue I'm looking at is "fixed in nightly", but some of those features in nightly take a long time to get accepted, and the ergonomics of split_array() seem a bit dubious to me. Are you going to chain three split_array() for four fields? Obviously, for simple serialization and deserialization there are a ton of different options to automate this code away, but it's nice to be able to write simple code like this when appropriate, and the ergonomics of simple tasks matter.)