Interesting perspective, I have talked to two very seniors engineers there who love the place(one worked there 7 years, other I am not sure). One of the things they like(and I would agree) is that Shopify does rewrite old stuff when they move to something new, so there are no leftover unmaintainable untouchable .

BTW what it shows is that, he loves to code. He already built an incredibly successful company. Whatever is that he does works. I love writing code too been doing it since I was 14. One of the reason I do not want to move to Engineering Management is the expectation of abandoning it.