Depends on the situation and constraints

Actually, your solution is DRY in the runtime sense but the solution above is actually more DRY in terms of code since you don't have to repeat certain things.

Out of curiousity why is this a code smell? Case/when seems like a natural solution to this particular problem.

which is why this is predominantly voted a clever solution

I hope you know what a sense of humor is

I think your argument would be valid if we were dealing with unknown length of the array but here the length is fixed making the complexty time constant.