An especially important piece of context is the stage the company is at. At the early stage, pre product market fit, bad code quality can actually be a good sig

An especially important piece of context is the stage the company is at. At the early stage, pre product market fit, bad code quality can actually be a good signal -- ie not merely not bad, but actively better than good code. Why? It's evidence that the team is moving quickly and is not afraid to change things in the code in less than ideal ways, because they are focused more on just making stuff work on the business end. This is exactly where you want to be at the early stage of a company, you do not want to be precious about doing things that scale - including writing good code and keeping data models clean and fully coherent.