>I think one of our problems is that people have downgraded the importance of this. Much code nowadays (rightly or wrongly) is considered "disposable" - people think that the likelihood of any given piece of code they are writing as surviving more than a few years is negligible.

I think younger devs think this. Once you get a decade or more experience, you grow wiser and realise that code never dies, and especially the code you wish would die is particularly tenacious. And this is pure speculation, but I would wager that the number of lines of legacy code that is kept alive with maintenance is much greater than the number of lines of code that gets abandoned/rewritten/obsoleted.