Believe me, very few grad students are writing code to "look smart".

First of all, coding isn't exactly a high class activity in most of academia. Any implementation that's not an uncommented mathematica notebook or matlab mess is in the top 1% of academic code.

Second of all, no one reads the code. So while there are incentives to intelli-obfuscate papers to trick naive reviewers, those incentives don't exist with code. (Oh, and it doesn't really work out well in papers either most of the time.)

Don't forget about the third type of shitty academic code: the gigantic pile of undocumented C++ that doesn't even build anymore.

That's why I like code reviews too, it forces you to express what you meant in a way that at least one other chap on this planet get it.

Plus the code is still fresh in your mind so you haven't forgotten why did it that way, and discarded trade-offs.

Don't forget that most academics cannot code correctly. Yes, even CS academics. In the AI field (not ML, but "real", symbolic AI), top-level open source academic software is, 90% of the time, pure shit. Sure, it does work, provided conditions don't change too much (for example, undefined behavior that will break if you compile with a newer version of gcc), but I hope you won't have to maintain it.