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For me it depends. Sometimes I find value in making a function for a block of work I can give its own name to, because that can make the flow more obvious when looking at what the function does at a high level. But arbitrarily breaking up a function just because is silly and pointless.

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Plus, laying the list of tasks out in order sometimes makes it obvious how to split it up eventually. If you try to split it up the first time you write it, you get a bunch of meaningless splits, but if you write a 300 line function, and let it simmer for a few weeks, usually you can spot commonalities later.

That's also true, though in this case I'm not necessarily worried about commonalities, just changing the way it reads to focus on the higher level ideas making up the large function.

But revisiting code after a time, either just because you slept on it or you've written more adjacent code, is almost always worth some time to try and improve the readability of the code (so long as you don't sacrifice performance unnecessarily).

Define that function directly in the place where it is used (e.g. as a lambda, if nesting of function definitions is not allowed). Keeps the locality and makes it obvious that you could just have put a comment instead.

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