In this specific case, the dashboard-page function is actually sequencing operations, not performing them (except for 5, and I'd wonder why that couldn't be moved to a separate function), and can be described as such:
// - control the login sequence
function login_sequence() {
var user = verify_login
if (!user) {
user = login();
}
var providers = collect_providers(user);
var profiles = collect_profiles(user);
var account_info = collect_account_info(user);
load_templates(user);
display_templates(providers, profiles, account_info);
}
(Forgive the guess at what your code might look like.)
State may be passed between called functions, and used in control decisions, but state should not be grossly manipulated in sequencing functions (I do find with this style of programming that at high levels the state passed around tends to be large 'context' objects, rather than granular arguments encountered at lower levels). What I would NOT want to see in such a hypothetical login function is ALL the actual lower level code to do the login, collect the data, etc., so that essential higher order detail is obscured by the lower level operations.
A function's API comments do not need to repeat the purpose of called functions.
As I come up with API comments last, I usually think about them in reverse -- it's not 'I need to think of the single purpose of this function before writing it', but 'what single purpose did this function end up serving?'. Not being able to think of a decent answer for the latter is a possible symptom of sub-optimal decomposition. Then again, cutting blocks of code and pasting them into their own functions has become an instinct rather than conscious decision for me, so I'm effectively anticipating writing the 'single purpose' API comments.
At a certain level of detail I don't need to know the minutae of login, just that there is some black box function that controls the lower level details. And if I need to know the details, I break open the function and follow its call flow (or look at the autogenerated call graph in the doxygen docs or similar).
Having read a lot of feral code, I find the major indicator of quality is the static navigability of the code base (i.e. can I find my way around just by reading the code in an editor, without resorting to debuggers or autogenerated documentation), and having a level of detail structure, akin to the zoom feature on Google maps, is one method of achieving navigability (and partially the value of OO techniques). So it's okay to have functions/methods that simply sequence or aggregate calls to lower levels, and to describe them as such.
It was mentioned elsewhere on the thread that debuggers are useful tools in understanding a code base -- and I do often find myself setting breakpoints on code because it's near impossible to understand how particular functions get invoked by just reading the code. Then examining the call stack at the breakpoint I see that event loop called the network code invoked some code to read a database, which called into some code to instantiate widgets, which called back into the database code, which called the code that calculates order totals and tax, which called the widget code again to update those fields, all of which goes 30+ levels deep.