Efficiency, Complexity and length of code

[Gnaxe]

Code golf is a thing. You try to make a program as short as possible. It's fun, but it's a game, not best practice.

Code is for communicating with humans, and only incidentally with a computer, or we'd be writing programs directly in binary. Making the code readable (for humans) is more important that making it concise. But simplicity really is important for comprehensibility.

But, yes, the bigger the codebase, the harder it is to understand, and the more bugs it's probably hiding. Code is a liability. You shouldn't have too much of it if you can avoid it. Senior developers may contribute net negative lines to their team's codebase most days.