The thing there is, all design patterns and coding practices are less than ideal.

People pick the best way they can come up with at a time and place, and everything is hunky-dory for one fleeting moment, and then the moment is gone. Any code that's good enough to survive will see the world change around it, until you've got a system that was developed for one niche and then spent years evolving into a new one as business and technical requirements changed, and will have plenty of quirks to show for it.

A good programmer can deal with that.

IMHO any non-trivial codebase will be awful in some parts. Codebases tell only half the story, and a programmer needs to also inherit the mindset that resulted in the code. Until that happens, there will be a research phase that will result in all the code being triaged multiple times, so the new coders can decide if the piece of code under triage is good, bad, or there's no way to know yet.

With that attitude anything a few years old will be called "awful", especially the latest, best shiniest code you are writing today.