Not sure why you and stinos think I'm advocating for blind trust. My point is simply that cleaner code is not intuitively self evidently better without experie

Not sure why you and stinos think I'm advocating for blind trust. My point is simply that cleaner code is not intuitively self evidently better without experience. It feels intuitive to senior engineers but even side by side comparisons aren't necessarily enough for juniors. The effort overhead required to achieve (effectively zero once you internalize it), but far from zero when you are a beginner does not seem like it offsets the hypothetical benefits. So articles like OP's are quite fascinating to me because they take a totally unorthodox approach to advocating for it.