This diff crosses the line to "too small".

Breaking the diff into too-small chunks makes the over-all idea harder to see and review, because it makes the actual change harder to see, and can actually hide quality issues that would be easier to see in a single diff.

Plus, ideally each diff should be able to stand on its own and have some positive value; While extracting $proxy and $is_column is arguably good - it somewhat improves readability of the code, and I would have accepted a change with only those two - extracting $saved_everything has a negative net effect - it adds another variable and increases the complexity of the code.

It makes sense to break a large diff into separate diffs if each part is still large enough and has some benefit on its own, but this isn't the case here.
Please fold this into the real revision.