There's lots of people that won't care about the code: executives, managers, customers etc. If the engineers don't care either, then who cares?
If we compare with big food companies, that's like their food formula. No one thinks it's useless - it's the source code for the product they sell. Yet nowadays we get so many engineers distancing themselves away from the code, like the software formula doesn't matter.
There are diminishing returns, but overall good code goes hand in hand with good products, it's just a different side of it.