less keys = more cognitive overhead. Having to remember what layer i put fucking pipe on is not better than just hitting the damn key.
In ~2000 I started suffering from tendonitis and my coding job became very painful, I tried kind of the 'easy onramp' ergo options at the time, namely the ms 'natural'. It did not help. Eventually someone pointed me at the kinesis advantage (then essential) and I bought one. After some struggle coming to terms with thumb keys and wells and ortholinerness I switched to it for all tasks except for gaming and my symptoms basically disapeared.
About 10 years back I was in a job that was potentially going to cause me to travel a lot, at that point I had already modded my kinesis advange keyboards with custom controllers and wanted to try and build something that travelled better, was smaller, while still not fucking up my wrists.
I built a lot of keyboards trying to shrink my luggage. I went ortho and built a split preonic, uncomfortable, then I went down the road that leads to corne/iris/etc (thumb keys, vertically aligned but not horizontally aligned). More comfortable but the thing i always ran into when removing keys. Overhead, you have to remember what layer and key you put xyz rarely used symbol on (and when you are a software engineer that's a lot of the symbols).. at the end of the road I built a very low profile board based on the dactyl with the same number of keys as the kinesis advantage minus the f-key chicklets. Reducing the number of layers i have to remember to 1 that only contains the grave and the fkeys.
Then covid hit and I didn't have to travel anywhere. I take my dactyl when I go see my parents, and unloaded most of my other boards for cheap. (i kept a 65 that I play games with)