I wouldn't attack the example too much, it does seem a little contrived to make the point - the very thing I don't like about contriving examples!
It is hard to know whether the principle is valuable with such a weird example. In this example there are lots of other ways it could have been done more meaningfully but, again, don't know if the example is real.
What doesn't generalize is that the example doesn't necessarily stand for a simple one-liner, but as an example it has to be trivial, of course.
But everything else generalizes. I took "splitting out the last 3 params" to mean "doing something very specific to the problem at hand" and extracting that isn't _always_ better.
