It really depends on the use case, but yeah dense can be fine.
But imagine staring at Foobar2000 all day as if it is your primary work. You probabbly are looking for just some of the data most of the time and filtering the rest... so in that case maybe less would be better.
On the other hand if you glance at it and want lots of data without clicks, then dense is great.
But your point about "logical" is the key for dense stuff, and getting to what is "logical" can be hard.
Have you heard of Bloomberg Terminal? Thousands of people stare at BT all day long full of dense information. You can attest to its success by the fact that it is the defacto standard in financial analysis.
Bloomberg could make it "modern" full of whitespace but they deliberately don't. Dense contextual information in my view is better than whitespace decorated vomit that we see in today's UX/UI trends.
And that's the main problem. Today's designers don't differentiate between websites and "serious" applications.
A website must be easy to navigate without any training because it's one of several hundred that the user visits each week. Any learnings are forgotten anyway on the next visit. So it has to be completely self-explanatory.
A "serious" application on the other side is used for several hours every day. Efficiency beats simplicity in that case because that three-day crash course a user might need in the beginning is neglectable in comparison to just five minutes of saved time per session on later use.
But most UX designers these days only seem to know casual, consumer-oriented - and then try to apply the same recipes to enterprise apps. It's almost always a disaster.
People are already naturally good at filtering out irrelevant information automatically. We do this all day as we take in data and focus on what we want.
So a dense UI can be naturally worked with while a lean UI offers no alternative.
But imagine staring at Foobar2000 all day as if it is your primary work. You probabbly are looking for just some of the data most of the time and filtering the rest... so in that case maybe less would be better.
On the other hand if you glance at it and want lots of data without clicks, then dense is great.
But your point about "logical" is the key for dense stuff, and getting to what is "logical" can be hard.