That's my biggest issue with it personally, as an academic. Way too much unnecessary indirection that makes it harder to read and understand the assumptions and parameters going into the code, and unnecessary defensive programming for code that is just going to be run a few different ways with strictly controlled inputs.
I knew it. I keep asking people why they're constantly checking if an attribute might be empty.
One particularly bad instance consisted of someone checking for the existence of an attribute on a class they had created themselves.
When I asked why they didn't simply ensure the attribute existed they got defensive.