I feel like this is bad advice, really, you need to be obsessed with quality and growth, but you can't let that stop you from shipping. Try for clean to the best of your ability in the time constraints you have, but accept that it will be dirty.

Obsession will stop you from shipping.

Or it's not an obsession.

It's caring.

Very few people can pull off a Steve Job level of nitpicking and actually finish a project.

I certainly couldn't, and that advice is for young me.

I think aiming for clean is good, but it’s really hard to pin down what clean means when you’re starting out.

I feel like just emulating what you see in your first few jobs is ideal. (As in, ask coworkers who know the thing you’re working on) It could be great code to be inspired from, or mediocre. Either way you get some input about what decisions result in what outcomes, and what the outcome “feels” like.

And if it comes time to change one or many of those decisions later on in this codebase, the person doing it gets a uniform codebase to work from! Unique abstractions and fixes in random places makes refactoring harder.

Then you find a new team, else you can do the classic 'making one trivial hill your Happy Path and be prepared to die on it' routine.