You can only get basic tweaks accepted. The sunk-cost fallacy is a huge force.
Maybe I've only worked at crappy places
If you aren't making your teammates better, and they aren't making you better, you will never be able to be as good as a team that is greater than the sum of its parts. Individual genius is consistently beat by professional collaboration.
A decent programmer can write code they can effectively work with. The really great programmers write code that even interns can effectively work with. The only way to get to that level is to get good at eliciting and taking in feedback from the people we want to be effective with our code.
It doesn't necessarily mean doing exactly what we are told: it means understanding the why of a comment, what underlying flaws or confusions a comment is pointing towards. It means encouraging people to ask questions in code reviews, rather than just leave commands: often a "how does this manage to do X?" comment points to a place where bugs were hiding anyway, even if also it is a chance to share a language feature.
Many engineers work in companies where being a really great programmer doesn't get you any points. Often the only reward for writing code that is easily modified later is the gratitude of a future developer asked to make a change to it years down the line.
But I am that developer often enough that that's still made the journey worth it for me.