It's usually only a "beautiful extendable maintainable paragon of elegance and purity" in the eyes of the original architect. Everyone else sees it as leaking abstraction with bolts everywhere to keep the original idea somewhat working... Or just a massive pile of technical debt.

Code quantity is always dependent on how well the person making this judgment understands the software. While I'm sure that everyone will agree that there are some clearly better ways of doing things, they sure as hell won't all agree on what these clearly better ways are.

One person's pile of garbage is the next person's perfect implementation with easy to understand procedural logic.

Please take note that I'm explicitly not saying that any implementation is better then another. I'm just trying to convey that the term technical debt very much depends on the mindset of the person looking at the implementation