It reminded me at the time where I was working at a 20 person startup and developing spike prototypes ahead of the other 15 developers. My favorite praise that I'd get from management was that my plans were "simple but not simplistic".
The software equivalent of "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". I will note, however, that the reviewer that Goedecke is disagreeing with isn't necessarily wrong, if the goal of the challenge is not just to create the absolute best possible code but to also demonstrate mastery. It would be a hell of a flex to write a complicated script though, then comment out everything that wasn't absolutely necessary and just leave the simple necessities.
"An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity. A physicist tries to make it simple. Anyway, an idiot, anything the more complicated it is, the more he will admire it. If you make something so clusterfucked he can't understand it, he's gonna think you're a god cause you made it so complicated nobody can understand it."