Yup, my conclusion exactly.
With that said, most code I have seen in private sector is almost objectively horrible (and certainly subjectively). Code manufactured with the current best tools such as Claude compares favourably. Companies rarely have the patience to pay for well manicured, elegant code. If it sort of works it ships.
A good engineer will tell you how to spend 25% of effort to get to 90% of the result you want. With maintainable code, and importantly with less code that touches fewer systems.
A bad engineer will deliver exactly what product asked for without asking questions, generate 4x the code, and touch every piece of the system.
Companies are just setup in a way that incentivizes building organizations that create bad code. Most places would rather hire 100 bad engineers who can be easily replaced than 5 good engineers.
Despite having worked with or managed hundreds of developers over the years, I don't think there were more than, maybe, 5 that I would not gladly swap for a claude-equivalent. Diligent, able to produce good code when adequately supervised, and devoid of a desire for work life balance :-)
Most software devs are just mediocre, they learn to code late in life, they work 9-5, and often stop learning as quickly as they can.
This is quite true, and it is this -- really, a special case of "the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent" -- that has me worried about the implications for the labour economy more than anything else.