I suspect your "reality" consists of very small and very homogeneous projects that leave you a fair chance of doing well with simple refactoring and reorganizat

I suspect your "reality" consists of very small and very homogeneous projects that leave you a fair chance of doing well with simple refactoring and reorganizations, not to mention starting from scratch frequently. But generating code allows you to make changes that cannot be expressed well in your programming language or using your libraries, for example validating the same data in the same way in two different front ends that don't allow refactoring.