I think you have a very specific, and not widely shared, definition of “code as art.” Code as art does not mean code full of pointless Rube Goldberg mechanisms or following some esoteric golden ratio whatever. For me, “code as art” means code which is well-abstracted, readable, correct, concise, maintainable, extensible, well-documented, performant, etc — I.e. reflecting the things that matter to me as a developer. The process of getting to the point where the code has all of those things, or as many as possible, is indeed the “art” of coding. To assume that the result is some horrible morass of spaghetti that no coworker wants to read is a strange one for sure.