I saw a fancy HTML table generator that had so many parameters and flags and bells and whistles that it took IIRC hundreds of lines of code to save writing a similar amount of HTML in a handful of different places.

Yes the initial HTML looked similar in these few places, and the resultant usage of the abstraction did not look similar.

But it took a very long time reading each place a table existed and quite a bit longer working out how to get it to generate the small amount of HTML you wanted to generate for a new case.

Definitely would have opted for repetition in this particular scenario.