I romanticized even before, because there is a reason why society's view of developers shifted from geek losers to rich in the past 15 years. I remember when 15 years ago a girl told me that I'm different, because I'm not as looser as how she imagined developers.
Well, geeks certainly know how to turn their kind into losers (again).
Exactly, as I recall pre-AI days, 90% of the code was more of a slop of whatever AI writes nowadays
And non-slop parts were maybe some prominent open source projects.
Most bigtech company had an internal joke of "we couldn't ever open source X, not because it can't be done, but it would be too embarrassing"
Regarding the average developer as an imbecile was a cottage industry from Djikstra to FizzBuzz.