The hacker's ethos is about freedom of information, freedom of access (apropos to this video about vibe coding accessibility tools), community, collaboration and so on.

I've never seen or heard "elegance" associated with hackers, hacking, the hacking ethos etc. If I were to go further, elegance as it is used here has some anti-hacker connotations, i.e. it is a gatekeeping term to separate "true" coders from "amateurs" which is very anti-hacker.

Anyway, I don't think I'm conflating these terms, but it could be true that my understanding of the hacker ethos is wrong.