For example, as you say, a small piece of stand alone code implies that someone can do meaningful work on it without understanding the entire context around it. It also implies that it is suitable for reuse. But if it’s both reused liberally and encourages you to keep working on it, it will almost certainly mean that your changes will have unanticipated consequences. So you still can’t get away with being unaware of the context.

When you break things apart you also fossilize that way of approaching the problem, which often makes it more difficult to see orthogonal approaches and refactor towards them later. Instead you keep working within the structure that’s already there, which often leads to concerns being spread out across different modules. Too often people decide on the structure before they even understand the problem.

I think it has similar problems as religiously following the DRY principle. There are so many situations where your code will be much, much worse if you insist on always sticking to DRY.