Lisp tends to build abstractions, too, and it also does that via macros, which are even harder to mentally parse unless you have a habit.

I'd say that to attain simplicity and clarity, you have to limit the use of abstraction. OTOH there's no way to avoid abstraction at all; programming is all about abstraction. If the means of abstraction are not powerful enough, copy-paste programming and boilerplate proliferate, making code less maintainable and harder to understand.

In my opinion, implementing these higher order functions with the help of one powerful abstraction (generics) is much simpler than having to deal with a bunch of special cased weaker abstractions (magic map, magic filter, magic reduce, magic...).