> Your customers don't care how your code smells, as long as it solves their problem and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

Software is interesting because if you buy a refrigerator, even an inexpensive one, you have certain expectations as to its basic functions. If the compressor were to cut out periodically in unexpected ways, affecting your food safety, you would return it.

But in software customers seem to be conditioned to just accept bugs and poor performance as a fact of life.

You're correct that customers don't care about "code quality", because they don't understand code or how to evaluate it.

But you're assuming that customers don't care about the quality of the product they are paying for, and you're divorcing that quality from the quality of the code as if the code doesn't represent THE implementation of the final product. The hardware matters too, but to assume that code quality doesn't directly affect product quality is to pretend that food quality is not directly impacted by its ingredients.