You do? I have the opposite experience: I regularly stumple over dirty code where levels of abstraction differ wildly and I regularly lose my train of thought, because some function writeToFile() all of a sudden shifts some bit in a register with an outdated comment next to it (overly dramatizised).
Functions never being longer than 4 lines goes, too far IMHO, but the “clean code should read like prose” bit is something that has been really useful to me.