Your analogy does not make sense to me. The professor clearly wanted his students to become not just better at hacking together solutions, but presenting readable, consistent code. This is a noble goal, and you're correct it has little to do with computing. It has to do with communicating to other people what you have done.

Good point the analogy definitely doesn't completely account for the adjacent field of software engineering, where coding styles are certainly important. I guess that's mostly because artists rarely work in large groups, and when they do, I'd imagine the work is mostly parallelize-able: several people don't need to go through the details of any single piece of work.

Animation. Easy to work in parallel but output is very constrained stylistically. Multiple author books tend to have stylistic constraints as well otherwise the book suffers from an uneven feeling.