I don't think they are obfuscating their code. I think they are writing code that looks good to them at the time. They think it's beautiful for some reason, and leave it that way.
Ideally, beautiful code should be readable by others, of course. Especially in Open Source. But some people don't think like that.
Programmers earn their paycheck (literally and figuratively speaking) by being smart. Hence, programmers value smarts.
I don't read nearly as much Python as I do Ruby, so when I speak, I'm speaking of the Ruby I've read. Ruby programmers use a lot of clever idioms. In a lot of cases, they make things more intuitive. In other cases, they make you scratch your head and wonder just what the hell is going on. This is usually a case where a programmer has picked up an idiom that they found clever, then used it in a scenario where the code actually becomes less clear. This is what the author is pointing out.
