I romanticized even before, because there is a reason why society's view of developers shifted from geek losers to rich in the past 15 years. I remember when 15 years ago a girl told me that I'm different, because I'm not as looser as how she imagined developers.

Exactly, as I recall pre-AI days, 90% of the code was more of a slop of whatever AI writes nowadays

And non-slop parts were maybe some prominent open source projects.

Most bigtech company had an internal joke of "we couldn't ever open source X, not because it can't be done, but it would be too embarrassing"

The ability to understand and maintain inherited projects is more valuable than the ability to create new greenfield projects.

There certainly is, but in my recollection, devs could tackle either. Again, it's been a while.

Did the delivery work functionally as expected? If yes, then they understood what they need to understand to do that work on code. You don't need to understand the whole codebase, just the parts relevant to the work at hand.

Ive worked and work with people who I dont consider super talented but sure as hell they understand the code, maybe just some lines, maybe the method, maybe the class, maybe the module and further.

Unless you worked at the shittiest company in the world, lets try to not bring others down just because they weren't as amazing as we are. They might have other skills weve lacked.

E.g. like a journalist complaining that they colleagues didn't publish books... who cares? Thats not their job, they need to write clear good concluded articles. If they write their articles like books, nobody reads that shit.

Then blame the (worst) workmen, not the medium.

I wrote complete systems that run businesses today. I understood every single line of code.

I'm not sure your experience is the norm.

I'm really glad that wasn't my career experience. I worked with a lot of extremely sharp devs in a variety of places. Dull ones were simply not hired.

Err. Along with FP, bottom-up design, and meta programming..