If your code is less clear after refactoring than before, you have gone a step too far in refactoring.

Your goals when refactoring is removing useless bit of code, make the code understandable without comment and remove duplication.

That is the last step that generally requires introducing additional abstractions layers and where stuff go wrong. Too often refactoring books or articles give examples of how to use refactoring technique, but for the sake of being readable, the examples rarely really require such refactoring in the first place.

But yeah, at the end of the day I also prefer a hackish piece of code that solves the problem than the same "refactored" into conceptual art.