I think you come to the conclusion because necessity is the mother of invention. Web development is often done in a high-pressure environment with great focus

I think you come to the conclusion because necessity is the mother of invention. Web development is often done in a high-pressure environment with great focus put on churning out features. This leads to the hacks-on-hacks mentality because the needs of the day trump any sort of coherent principle emerging from thoughtful work on the codebase. I resided over a medium sized custom CMS that was going through changes on all levels. I tried my best to keep it pretty. Fact it was made with Python made it easier for me. Due to that I was quick to find aesthetics to guide my coding. One of the "ugly hacks" actually turned out to save some 50 ms of time on each request. That was significant enough for me to go find a deeper principle for it and implement it in a nice, clean way. Hacks-on-hacks is SNAFU for web development. Just remember to demand time to refactor and clean up once in a while, otherwise you'll end up shoveling shit from one pile to the next and never managing to vacate it.