Yeah, I've seen this a ton. And it sucks because it's always done with good intentions.
That's why I think that if you need small helpers keep them short and prevent them from going too deep. Nothing is worse than digging through 10 layers of functions just to figure out what's going on.
For sure there are better abstractions that would help. I still think that they only help with over abstraction to a certain point. Digging 5 classes deep just to figure out what's actually happening is just as, if not more, frustrating than digging 5 functions deep.