Author here; I think I understand where you might be coming from. I find functional nature of R combined with pipes incredibly powerful and elegant to work with.
OTOH in a pipeline, you're mutating/summarising/joining a data frame, and it's really difficult to look at it and keep track of what state the data is in. I try my best to write in a way that you understand the state of the data (hence the tables I spread throughout the post), but I do acknowledge it can be inscrutable.
A "pipe" is simply a composition of functions. Tidyverse adds a different syntax for doing function composition, using the pipe operator, which I don't particularly like. My general objection to Tidyverse is that it tries to reinvent everything but the end result is a language that is less practical and less transparent than standard R.
The following code essentially redoes what the code up to the first conf_interval block does there. Which one is more clear may be debatable but it's shorter by a factor of two and faster by a factor of ten (45 seconds vs 4 for me).
I am old, so I do not like tidyverse either -- I can concede it is of personal preference though. (Personally do not agree with the lattice vs ggplot comment for example.)
OTOH in a pipeline, you're mutating/summarising/joining a data frame, and it's really difficult to look at it and keep track of what state the data is in. I try my best to write in a way that you understand the state of the data (hence the tables I spread throughout the post), but I do acknowledge it can be inscrutable.