What I have seen is situations where things were made horribly complicated to get around protections for which there was no need, and to try to guard the consistency of data structures that were horribly over-complicated and un-normalized.

They are based on defensive coding carried to extremes.

Conventions are good, but they are very limited: enforce them too little and the programmer becomes coupled to the code—no one will ever understand what they meant once they are gone. Enforce too much and you will have hour-long debates about every space and colon (true story.) The “habitable zone” is very narrow and easy to miss.

It's a great way to test various limits. When you think about this even more, it's a little mind-bending, as we're trying to impose a global clock ("who is the most up to date") on a system that inherently doesn't have a global clock. When we scale time down to nanoseconds, this affects us in the real world of today: a light-nanosecond is not very far.

become more obscure in functionality to the point where some names literally describe what they do

Hey, that’s is an imaginary complication of our example - please don’t do this with every condition you have in your app.

computers theoretically need only one machine instruction (subtract one number from another and branch if the result is negative)

This is a useful approach to error handling, but please don’t take it to extremes! See my post on “Against Railway-Oriented Programming”.

Stating that some language feature or common programming idiom (like accessors) has problems is not the same thing as saying you should never use them under any circumstances.

Although I’m trying to make a case against logic-less templates, that does not mean that I am advocating the other extreme