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You've given some good examples of nesting which don't introduce branches, but most nesting does and therefore, nesting is an approximation for the cyclomatic complexity of a piece of code. Reducing this complexity helps with testability and (moreso) with the ability of humans to understand the code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity

Agree with you that reducing nesting is not in and of itself beneficial.

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Cyclomatic complexity seems like a great example of Goodhart's Law [1]. I absolutely agree that on the whole, code with fewer paths tends to be easier to read. However, taking deeply nested code and arbitrarily pulling chunks of it out into functions which only have a single caller and don't really abstract anything that's ever going to be terribly meaningful on its own seldom makes it better in my experience -- and can force a lot of skipping around if you're actually trying to understand what the system as a whole is trying to do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

If you punish nesting a smart developer might use imaginable horror (with the same or worse complexity) to keep the code flattened. Nesting makes the complexity apparent.

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