This article talks about a time someone made an abstract class and then took DRY a little too far. If this is an example of 'being clever' then anyone using map instead of writing a for-loop would have to be at gaussian levels of cleverness.
[Also a class generator is implied to be less clever than an abstract class ... I'm not sure I can accept the usage of 'clever' in the article as meaningful.]
A new pattern may seem "clever" or "difficult" if you haven't encountered it before; but if you spend time with it and work with it, it can look like the most natural thing in the world.
But I do agree with the direction of your thought. The reading material at least needs to be inherently balanced rather than writing itself getting balanced out by 50% of articles talking about "Using proxies to prevent null pointer errors"(guilty of writing this) and the other half being "Maybe proxies are a bad idea".