"Personally, I find that ternary example you posted to be terrible code."

It's not about the line count, it's about expressing the main idea clearly and succinctly, which this code does.

My nitpick would be with the language constructs themselves. The ternary operator is simply a crutch for lack of an if-then expression returning a value.

    if a < b then -1 elsif a > b then 1 else 0

Or can add some white space to make the structure a little more clear:

    if a < b then
      -1
    elsif a > b then
      1
    else
      0
    end

Expressions like the ternary operator micro-optimize by replacing tokens recognizable as natural language words with arbitrary punctuation. But that's a language level complaint, which you generally don't have any control over once you've started the project or when editing existing code.