He's not pearl clutching. He's in love with that car. He keeps it immaculate and he has a sparkle in his eye when he talks about it.
Some people are the same with furniture. They buy super expensive, custom stuff and look after it for decades. Not me! All through my 20s I didn't care at all and my various homes were full of cheap ikea furniture. I had bills that need to be paid, and why should I pay more? Most of it is probably in landfill by now.
I'm not an expensive furniture guy. And I'm not an expensive car guy - I don't even own a car. But I am into software. Software is kind of my thing. When software works fast and well, when its clean, reliable, tested and memory efficient - its the best. I know deep down everything is right in the world.
And, obviously, I hate disposable, cheaply made software. I hate when software runs slowly. I hate seeing my expensive computer working hard to do basically nothing because of lazy code. And I hate running into stupid, avoidable bugs. I don't want to create work like that. And I don't want to use with software like that. When software is laggy and unreliable, my skin crawls and I feel disgusting.
Intellectually, I recognize that there's a place for the cheap ikea furniture equivalent in software. But craftsmanship matters to me. And I personally, hate bad software and I don't want it on my computer.
Does that make me a pearl clutching, elitist snob? Sure, whatever. But I'm done acting like I'm sorry for what I like.
I think if you feel strongly about something you should defend it!
I know you're right; but this still deeply saddens me. I want well crafted software. I want the code I write and the code I depend on to be made in a way that holds reverence and honor for the craft of software engineering.
I don't want to be running crappy, badly performing javascript made by average talent in react, that exists to serve someone else's transient business needs. Gross.