When I went to Chez Panisse for the first time—not Michelin starred, but still well-regarded—I didn't know what to expect. What surprised me was that it was just "what I normally eat" but better. Not fancy, not exotic, not flashy; at a surface level, it was less interesting than food I've had at "normal" restaurants... but it was somehow just better. It surprised me because I hadn't realize just how much room there was to improve on the details and execution of, well, "normal" cooking.
I've occasionally seen something similar with codebases. Most code does what it needs to do, more or less, and hopefully it's not awful, but there are all kinds of sharp edges, inconsistencies, extra sources of friction—when I need to make a change, it's doable, but even the happy path has a bit of extra friction here and there, things that are clearly missing or in the wrong place or a bit hacky. And then, once in a while, I run into code that doesn't have those problems. Everything just somehow comes together; when I need to do something, there's an obvious way of doing it; when there's something odd in the design, it ends up addressing something I hadn't thought about. Somebody wrote the code with experience, attention to detail and the will to do quality work for its own sake. I don't know if it's the same with cooking, but with this kind of code, it generally took less time and effort for the people writing it than I'd expect from teams working on messier codebases.
Running into things like this is a visceral reminder that even "normal" things—normal food, normal code—can just be better. A lot.