From my interactions with grad students / the research culture when I was in college, proper programming was encouraged, but made no impact on your career eithe

From my interactions with grad students / the research culture when I was in college, proper programming was encouraged, but made no impact on your career either way. It's simply a matter of incentives. Your good code is not going to graduate you faster, or get you that faculty/postdoc position. Grad students have a million things to do all the time, unlike at a normal job where you might have a whole team that's responsible for the backlog, and you might have some downtime because you just finished a project or are waiting for a code review. And many of my interactions were with CS grad students in algorithms/AI! To be fair, most systems researchers care a lot about good code, because the end product of your research often was a piece of open source software, which would go towards your thesis / getting a faculty job.