People don’t, in fact, read code from top to bottom, left to right

100% this.

This false premise is also why a few (objectively wrong) people defend writing long essays: functions with hundreds of lines and files with thousands; saying "then you don't have to go back and forth to read it", when in fact, no one should be reading it like a novel in the first place.

Once you get used with list and dict comprehensions, they read just fine. Much like the functional approach is not really that readable for a newcomer either.