In my circle of peers, and perhaps beyond, we use "clever" as a pejorative. It roughly means what you said in the last sentence, "more of a display of clevernes

In my circle of peers, and perhaps beyond, we use "clever" as a pejorative. It roughly means what you said in the last sentence, "more of a display of cleverness than actual cleverness." In other words, calling a piece of code clever, indicates that it was made too complicated to easily grok. We also have an explicit goal of making code not clever.