If you had me on an IRC server that had to service the numbers that Twitch is talking about; I would use every single server coding practice I am aware of. Someone else comes along. Maybe his first refactor would be to remove the buffer pooling. Maybe he'd change a data structure specifically designed to prevent false sharing, cutting throughput.

Good code doesn't always mean approachable code, writing a decent socket server in C assumes a ton of advanced knowledge.

If Sally had to write, say, a C logging library it would be a masterpiece of simplicity. These days your code has an audience, and those audiences can vary quite greatly.