Social Experiment. Become Me. What I see, you see.
After reading this I think we should indeed stop following those rules.
At my job we follow the "Understandable code" rule, which means if another programmer can read it like a book and understand what it does, then it's good.
We also regroup classes as Business Entities which is based on tables from the DB.
Functions and methods are linked to the tables which is easier to understand what each operations do.
Knowing what to change is only half the battle. Being able to change it safely and accurately with confidence is the rest.
Understanding and trusting the intent of the code, which relates to how easily one can read it, only helps with the first part. Improving the structure by removing duplication helps a lot with the rest.
Mlnd you, given how low the bar generally is with code, this is still quite a lot. Even so, we can do better.
So yes, let's take care about how quickly our fellow programmers understand the code, but let's not stop there.