I recently left a company organized in this way. It was quite disheartening: small changes would break the code in multiple ways, hundreds of public functions, no interfaces. The architect was seen as a ‘super’ developer...
Perhaps an ideal scenario would be to have a single 'super' developer have relatively free reign, under the condition that she can explain the code/architecture to others effectively also.
Yeah, definitely not an ideal scenario.
A good developer should write code that is easy for computer and human to understand. Unfortunately most firms seem to have as 'As long as it works, its good!' policy.
And how many of those were untested? Most I imagine.