Sounds about right:

https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/clever-code-is-probably-the-worst

While I was proud of it, there was suddenly a problem when I talked to my manager about it. “While I understand how complex this was, when it comes to performance reviews, this code looks trivial. It looks too easy, too simple. I would recommend writing an implementation doc of this module just so we can demonstrate that this was actually quite complex.”