I mean even when I'm working on my own projects I'm cleaning up whatever code I wrote when I didn't yet know as much about the shape of the problem.

We still don’t know what good code is. It is all contextual, and we can never decide what that context should be. We are influenced by what is hip today. Right now is static typing using Rust, tomorrow it might be energy usage with assembly, after that it might be Python for productiveness, after that C# for maintenance.

We can never decide, we just like learning, and there is little real, impactful research into programming as a business.

In two decades we will still collectively say ”we are learning so much”, ignoring that fact.