Unfortunately, no, simpler systems often take longer to create. It's always easiest to just add some janky widget hanging off the side, than to rejigger the whole system to be simpler. It's like the Pascal quote: "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter."

They take less to review and maintain etc, but the credit for those positives aren't assigned to the original engineer. Which is the point of the article.