My point isn’t that my experience is universal, but that I find it statistically unlikely that this is nearly as hard as people are making it out to be at the majority of SWE roles.

If you find yourself repeatedly working at places where the only option is to crank out garbage at breakneck pace, I don’t know what to tell you. If you stipulate as an axiom that it's impossible to write quality software at ${JOB}, then you're right, by definition there's nothing to be done. I just don't find that a particularly helpful mindset.