Even though I like intermediate variables myself, I've been told the same thing when co-authoring code.

What these anecdotes suggest is that this is subjective, and I think it can be overdone. I don't think objective general rules can be established from the article, even though I think it's good advice.

In my examples, I was overdoing it and causing too many indirections, creating leaky abstractions (leaky because, in my context, the abstraction was not tightly self-contained and understanding the "implementation" of the abstraction was necessary to understand what the line of code that was using it was doing).

I don't think it's a black-and-white matter. Your reviewer might not necessarily have been a moron, or might have lacked the self-awareness to realize they were imposing their own preferences onto you. But there's a slight chance that you legitimately confused them with your indirections. Hard to say without context.