Hi! I'm the author of the post. Glad folks found it interesting.

One comment I would add on top of what's being discussed here is that I actually am not arguing that the main engineering tradeoff is between quality and speed.

Instead, what I'm saying is the best engineers I've worked with work backwards from the user experience (the product) and engineer their system and app in support of it - e.g. they judge their work by how well the product works, not by some other metrics around the code in the abstract. They do tend to produce what you might consider great code (code that is simple, well factored, well tested), but the point to them is that they need to do that in order for the app to work really well.

Thanks for all the feedback!