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Well obviously don't refactor in a vaccum, part of an engineer's skillset is anticipating future changes and being flexible to them. You can still get DRY with slightly different functionality, most people with some OOP background should know how. Most of the points you bring up have nothing to do with refactoring and everything to do with other failed processes.

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I'm not saying refactoring is bad. I'm saying that in my experience engineers who "never stop refactoring" (the topic of this post) frequently do it badly and cause more harm than they actual long-term code improvements.

I have had the opposite experience which is more in line with the author of the article. Most coworkers I've had that refactor a lot were the best technical coders on the team and we're usually refactoring other people's short sightedness.

If you do a lot of refactoring you get better at it. You learn to write code that is easily refactorable, so that it doesn't hurt to refactor it again later.

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