Part of the issues with Kubernetes is that it started as a Java project and then it became a Go project. If anyone started a large Go project with that mindset it would look messy no matter what you did.
I agree that from a single sample you can’t reach conclusions, but “it was their fault” isn’t a great defense.
Many large projects may look like a mess but their success is because they got the high level architecture right and perhaps had the moat of a large tech behemoth behind them.
VSCode, Tensorflow, Kubernetes, Go, Typescript, React. These are a few that come to mind.
At a high level, they are all fantastic projects and perhaps messy in their own way, but they are absolutely fantastic, hardened proven codebases with ~millions of users.