It sounds like you have much too high expectations. If you must compare yourself to others and their code, do not compare yourself with those who publish code regularly. A more grounded comparison would be between you and others who don't publish - tinkerers, students, some enterprise professionals, and so on.

Anyways, you should see some code that gets submitted as homework tasks in interviews from enterprise programmers. That is the stuff that programmers do not publish, and the range of code quality and code understanding is large. There are working professionals with multi-year experience in C++ who cannot describe in their own words the relationship between a raw pointer and a memory address. I don't have a strong opinion on that, I've seen it all. But the quality bar to feel good enough about your work is not as high as you think it is, probably.

Also... there is a lot of fanaticism and brash comments about programming online. There is a reason why the "very online" group of people doesn't overlap with experts in any almost any industry. Opinions of most experts on things like code quality are very measured, they don't earn a lot of karma or upvotes, or likes. So don't put too much weight on what you see online when choosing to publish or not publish code, a lot of online comments are for shock value.