I'm not going to disagree completely with @pavon. He's stating his lived experience and I respect that. Maybe people are different in this regard. I'm more in line w/ @hardware2win. More smaller functions just seem to add to the cognitive load. But I am a fan of cascading a bunch of message sends / method invocations. I've never had a problem with that.

People seem to be passionate about their answers, now I want to get the programmer psychology book and see if there's data about people being more effective with or without a lot of small functions.

Those guidelines should (my personal position) be taken as advisory, and never as hard rules. Functions should be “small enough, that a less than gifted can understand it”. Is difficult to measure in lines. Best example is a big switch with 10 cases. Artificially breaking that in smaller pieces is not helpful. I have a soft rule of 3 to 7 different control structures (if, for, case, etc) in total, and 2 or 3 nested.