The thing is good code doesn’t cost more than bad code in the long run. In many cases it doesn’t even cost more in the short run. And it usually has nothing to do with being manicured or elegant.

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.