> “Good code is simple” doesn’t actually say anything. [...] What we call “simple” depends on our experience, skills, interest, patience, and curiosity.

I like Rich Hickey's stance on this: "simple" is objective (antonym: "complex"), whereas "easy" is subjective (antonym: "hard"). Easy depends on skills, interest, patience, curiosity - but simple does not. Simple is about lack of intertwining of concerns. About writing code that can be understood without "bringing in" the entire codebase into your mind. Like, you can understand a pure function just by looking at it (it's simple). If it modifies or uses a global variable, now you have to look at all the places that "touch" that global variable, in order to understand what your function does; the code is thus much more complex.

With that definition - it's absolutely correct to say that the code should be as simple as possible. And that writing simple code is typically very hard.