It's a nice interpretation.

I prefer a different approach: "smart is good; clever isn't smart". If you have to express something in a clever, that is, highly contrived but actually working way, it means that you lack the right way to express it, and maybe your mental model of the problem is not that good. The theory of epicycles is clever; Kepler's laws are smart.

Very unconvincing. If you become cleverer you can just write even more clever code and still not be able to debug it.

Great!

This can probably true for some people, but still will not work for many other. One probable outcome of a frustrated debugging session is "let's rewrite/refactor it to make it easier to debug next time", and not self-enlightenment.