Of course I think we have all seen horrors like that - what I remember was his completely exasperated response not the technical details of the bug.

Complexity is mostly exponentiellt worse in the unknowns and you can not graph what you already know.

The point in the article is that when we read code we need another visualization to change or mental model. I can scan code and find most bugs fast, but when you are stuck a complexity by row/column sure would be handy to find overloaded assignments.