No viable position for most companies (or even most startups) to take.
Not if it comes at the cost of making your co-workers hate you for the messes you continually leave behind. And to lose faith in upper management for holding you up to be a "rockstar" for doing so. And for them to start looking for new jobs, as a result.
The optimal level for basic hygiene and defense programming in a startup is -- perhaps a notch or two lower than in a staid, manager-driven post-startup company. But certainly not zero.
"The nose knows", as they say.
I love dumb, straightforward code BTW. It's my guiding aesthetic much of the time in fact. But that wasn't what I was referring to, here.
Rather the "too smart for its own good... and utterly brain-fucked" end product which is the calling card of your average rockstar / ninja developer.
And at an early startup, making the damn thing work is all that really matters. (I'm at a laterish startup and we do attempt to follow some process and patterns where it would structure things enough to enable cleaner onboarding as we grow).