I absolutely agree that method extraction can be abused. One should not forget that locality is important. Functionnal idioms do help to minimise the layer of intermediate functions. Lamda/closure helps too by having the function much closer to its use site. And local variables can sometime be a better choice than having a function that return just an expression.
There are cases where instead of
origin/master..HEAD
you may want to use@{upstream}..HEAD
instead to compare with the upstream of your current branch. It’s unfortunately quite unknown.