Yeah, that's the thing - the people who do have the experience largely either don't share (heavily introverted/low social presence overall, takes too much time

Yeah, that's the thing - the people who do have the experience largely either don't share (heavily introverted/low social presence overall, takes too much time to write blog posts, open source various efforts with poor documentation) or can't share (proprietary knowledge). Most of what you're going to find is low quality. The reality is that, if they're not career programmers who have spent x amount of years at a AAA developer, the code is probably bad. Even if they have, there's a chance that the code is bad. Most of what you're going to find is definitely of the "if it works, we're done" variety (part of this has to do with the time and effort that it takes to make games in general). If you want "rigorous software engineering," you really have to look at formerly commercial (or even still commercial) games that have been open-sourced and try and figure things out from there. Good learning materials are just hard to find. That's why I said just build stuff. You build it, you apply whatever optimizations to the structure or code itself, and you learn good practices through experience.