You need to know what is good code. Opinions may vary a lot between programmers, even senior ones. The Clean Code cult would tell you to find good code there but that is the most poisonous programming book I have read.
What I mean by that: Good code is code that has proven itself by surviving quietly in a long-living project that has changed a lot over many cycles of new engineers (experienced or otherwise) being onboarded. The less you hear people complain about it but the more you find people using or relying on it in some way, the better the code. If people are loud about how much they like it, it’s either new, or it’s something they’ve convinced themselves to like but know in their hearts is bad. It’s the stuff that just works that’s good - it’s so good people don’t even notice it.
Conversely, looking for the parts of a codebase with the highest churn will tell you immediately what all the devs on that codebase will complain about, if you ask them. This has worked for me extremely well across a number of projects.
Surely you don’t just presume the quality of code based on the person who wrote the code, right?
This reminds me of what Dijkstra said (paraphrasing): the computation is the important thing, not the code.
It is a bit sad but I think with the advent of LLMs some of the stylistic quirks of programmers past will become a bit anachronistic. Still, they will present opportunities for code archeology.