But in one of the scenarios I mention earlier, I earned a chunk of money once fixing an issue that emerged in a subcontractor's four or five line duplication that had ended up rippled through a long-lived codebase. A ground truth (MySQL version) changed, and the pattern broke everywhere, including places where it had evolved.
So I tend towards thinking, yes, any three-line pattern that is likely to appear everywhere should, perhaps, be centralised.
It's certainly worthy of serious consideration. Usually pretty easy to maintain the surface of such an abstraction.
