To me, elegant code is DRY code. Elegant code is code with useful abstractions where needed, and no abstractions where they just complicate matters. Code that is succinct yet clearly communicates its purpose.
From the sounds of it, you have an entirely different conception of what elegant code looks like.
The whole purpose, to me, of artfulness in code is to take unartful, hard to understand code and make it simple. What other objective is there?
Honestly, I had rather art be kept out of the user facing frontend. (Computer programming, on the other hand, is considered art by some computer scientists.)
It's probably changed a lot since, but at least back in the 90s demo-scene code was absolutely 100% written for the result alone, even perhaps when it should perhaps have been say 75% for the sake of reusability. Imagine "decent" 90s game code quality, then dial the qualitynotch down a bit, since it will only have to work once on a well-defined machine anway.
I'm long since tuned-out. I do seem to remember Farbrausch making some waves when they started applying the concept of reusability and structure to their work in the early 2000s.
You do not know the meaning of elegant. At least in context of programming and maths.