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I really doubt there is any such consensus. Some people really care about superficial code quality (good variable names; short functions; consistent formatting and documentation; compiles without warnings). Other programmers care mostly about architectural quality (shallow call stacks; correct data structures; few dependencies and little scaffolding).

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As stated in the previous comment, if you give code from group A to group B, they will tell you “I would prefer this and that, but still seems clean to me”

I don't agree. I know what the previous comment said.

Modern C++ codebases that make extensive use of templates, inheritance, exceptions, type coercion, closures are considered clean by many because the code looks nice. But code like that can be a nightmare to work with, because of long compile times, spooky action at a distance, etc.

Take these two files from LLVM:

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/libcxx/includ...

Is this "clean code"? I'm confident there will be absolutely no consensus.

It depends on the language. Some languages are just poorly designed and make it really hard to write anything that’s clean without trade-offs.

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