This "level of abstraction" euphemism actually means "the level at which I'm not reading code anymore even and especially if I should". Of course, linear code is more readable! Linear everything is more readable. Have you ever seen a novel with "levels of abstraction" in it?

But nobody reads the code anymore. Why bother? You're not going to stay on a single project for long enough for the attention investment to pay off. So the common best practice at the moment is to pretend that you read the code without actually reading it. For this purpose, the green code is much much better.