The article didn’t mention if the team that wrote the dirty code had done a code review. If they did, it doesn’t mention whether the author of the article looked at the interaction between the code author(s) and the reviewer. Perhaps this was discussed and the repetitive code accepted with good reason?

When code is merged, it should be too late for further discussion. The review is done and flaws like this is debt that should be taken care of the next time someone needs to touch it.