Best sentence in the article. I’ve worked in well-organized and reliable PHP apps, and giant buggy abortions in TypeScript. Lots of Rails apps with varying degrees of quality. Languages and frameworks can’t fix disorganization, poor architecture, laziness, or most of all, ignorance of how the Web should work (and why.)
The main predictor of how good your app will be technically, is the skill level of your worst developers + how much your best developers care (or are allowed to care, which necessarily varies with business conditions). Regardless of if you’re using trendy languages like Rust, TS, etc.
Of course, while as hackers we desperately wish for the app to be of very high quality, the sad truth is that companies who always obsess over the finest details under the hood don’t tend to perform as well financially as the ones who make compromises to get things to market faster and pivot more effectively, so I think that’s why most of us have rarely worked in commercial codebases where nothing is embarrassing.