Pro developers who really care about the sound variously write in C/C++ or use cross compilers for pd or Max. High quality oscillators, filters, reverb etc are hard work, although you can certainly get very good results with basic ones given today's fast processors.
Live coding is better for conditionals like 'every time [note] is played increment [counter], when [counter] > 15 reset [counter] to 0 and trigger [something else]'. But people who are focused on the result rather than the live coding performance tend to either make their own custom tooling (Autechre) or programmable Eurorack modules that integrate into a larger setup, eg https://www.perfectcircuit.com/signal/the-programmable-euror...
It's not that you can't get great musical results via coding, of course you can. But coding as performance is a celebration of the repl, not of the music per se.
I like your idea of celebrating the repl, its right up there with performance menu diving as a statement for how orthogonal things can get .. I’ve never enjoyed fishing for parameters, so having editor chops applied musically is .. refreshing .. in some strange ways.
Sure wish hardware manufactures would be motivated to not just throw a linked list and a couple of buttons at the parameter issue ..
No it wasn't. Jean-Michel Jarre sold 80 million albums and is one of the most famous musicians of the 20th century.
(Disclaimer: I've been in the MI business for decades, I've seen some things..)
Consider this: there are teenagers today, out there somewhere, learning to code music. Remember when synthesisers were young and cool and there was an explosion of different engines and implementations?
This is happening for the kids, again.
Try to use this new technology to replicate the modern, and then the old sound, and then discover new sounds. Like we synth nerds have been doing for decades.