> Then came a long awkward phase where I tried to fit in closely with other people's styles and figure out their intent and design - this is a very difficult way to write code and I wasn't very productive.

My first gig was at a 3 person team, including me. The other two wrote their code in basically identical format. I ended up codifying a linter config to make a style guide that basically all existing code already fit into. I remember thinking, this is never going to be so easy again.

Your post makes me think I was right.