Code 'longevity' is influenced by many more factors than code quality; e.g. rate of business change, traffic changes, infrastructure dependencies, and the complexity of the surrounding system.
As a pathological counter example think about arcane obtuse code that people are afraid to modify.
That's a good point. I didn't really define what I meant by 'best'. In some cases the code was used, updated, etc... for many many years by people I knew. If people were too afraid to touch it when a bug was found, then definitely not good. But, if people had no need to touch it b/c it works, that's a good spot to be also.
Which is such a weird perspective to me. The point of writing software for business is to solve a business problem. Maybe it's a function of working in small companies and/or roles that straddle code writing and business, but I have a hard time writing good code unless I know the business problem space.
It's also why I think I don't get too worked up in the language arguments. I've written code from VB5 to Java to Go to JS all which deliver immense business value. When I think about the best code I've ever written, I don't think about how pretty it was or even the language, but is it still in use 5-10-20 years later.