I only "lead" one project (a minuscule thing by all means) and it was the first time I was responsible, and instead of burning out in rabbitholes, I discovered the bliss of being sharp cause I had near no time to allocate to anything. Suddenly only the minimum amount of change was important and you stop caring for so many parameters. It leads to a saner sense of skills and progress.
You also start to understand systemic ideas better, every patch or change will have your brain think "is this gonna rot fast ? or will it be nicely decoupled from the rest and more pros than cons in the future?". No effort is wasted, every step improves the system. It feels very good, and makes you want to do more of that. Unlike 99% of side projects where you spend days on DESIGN.md or TODO or watching conferences about <trick>
there's a lot of artistry, poetry, idealism in programming, but as a daily money making activity it just doesn't cut it. You have to reach goals as easily as possible (dry,yagni) fast without painting yourself in corners as much as you can (low coupling, min interdependencies). Finding the right variability points.
it's something school don't do well (saying this humbly) yet crucial
ps: I disagree with the article title. k&r, mccarthy's lisp, prolog, and many other have very clean general and beautiful code.