> I have seen more benefit from it than harm.

Same. I, too, am sick of bloated code. But I use the quote as a reminder to myself: "look, the fact that you could spend the rest of the workday making this function run in linear instead of quadratic time doesn't mean you should – you have so many other tasks to tackle that it's better that you leave the suboptimal-but-obviously-correct implementation of this one little piece as-is for now, and return to it later if you need to".