I have consistently found the opposite to be the case across decades of programming experience, as regards the extraction of helper functions. This is not "indirection" in the same sense as with data structures. It is abstraction of currently-irrelevant detail.

Reading and understanding code is a process of answering "what are the immediate steps of this task?", without thinking about what those steps consist of or entail. It is not a process of answering "where is the variable representing ..., and the code that manipulates this?", especially since this makes assumptions that may prove incorrect.