The biggest challenge here I think is that we don't have an objective definition of clever code, and if you ask, most people will just try to retroactively just

The biggest challenge here I think is that we don't have an objective definition of clever code, and if you ask, most people will just try to retroactively justify why the current mainstream way of writing things is good and not at all clever. If you do something unusual, people think you're trying to be clever. I think that a lot of the stuff people take for granted in modern programming languages would've been considered clever tricks or just complex and alien mechanisms by the average programmer around when I started 25 years ago (remember serious business that ran on basic?). The way mainstream code looks today has changed a lot compared to then, and I predict it will still change a lot.