Here's the thing - you can spend forever making the code pretty. It would never end. I would say writing the code "with care" simply depends on the initial tea

Here's the thing - you can spend forever making the code pretty. It would never end. I would say writing the code "with care" simply depends on the initial team. There are plenty of startups that take the extra 20% or so time to build it right and with care that are successful. I worked at one company with a wonderful code base for seven years. They're about to hit 100m ARR. We wrote tests, mostly used Java, and cared about building reusable components and a platform. I would say hitting 100m ARR in that timespan is good.