You're not eliminating "code smell" here because that's not code smell. It's using whitespace and comments to provide clarity.

You're ADDING code smell through moving code all over creation making it harder to find each of the steps, and by adding the overhead of three new methods that would in turn call those sub-methods. Adding more code, far calls, and memory thrashing to replace comments and whitespace that are ignored at the parsing stage is NOT removing code smell, it's stinking the place up!

And honestly this type of pedantic BS is why I think linters are incompetent trash. So much ignorant fairy tale BS misinterpreted by folks who take one nutjobs personal pet peeves and treat them as the gospel. See every time some JS linter bitches about drop-through on case; it's like "seriously? Go suck an egg!"

— edit — though I missed it in your article, if they’re using like a dozen blank lines to separate those things, that’s just dumbass. That’s why I like editors that have options like “merge blank lines”. If you need more than one blank line, you’re probably doing something wrong… like using multiple blank lines where one provides MORE than enough clarity.

That’s a bit of a “doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!” scenario.