I think this is a much wider problem than just in academia/research. Really any area where software isn't the primary product tends to have fairly lax software

I think this is a much wider problem than just in academia/research. Really any area where software isn't the primary product tends to have fairly lax software standards. I work in the embedded firmware field and best practices are often looked at with skepticism and even derision by the electrical engineers who are often the ones doing the programming^[1]. I think software development as a field is incredibly vast and diverse. Programming is an amazing tool, but it's a tool that requires a lot of knowledge in a lot of different areas. ^[1] This isn't universally true of course, I'm not trying to be insulting here.