That's not true though. Bad code will manifest in a lot of ways. Affecting players and how they perceive the game.
See Cyberpunk 2077, the art is pretty good, but the game is extremely buggy. I stopped playing because of that
Sure, I don't disagree with bugs being problematic. As your example indicates though, games that came out well before LLM coding was a thing still could have buggy code. My point is that the actual behavior of the game's code is what players care about, not the code itself. The code is a process rather than the output, and players care about the output rather than the process used to produce it. Art assets are the output the player looks at directly, so it's not crazy that they might care more about it.