Does it matter to the people requesting the software if it acts in the way they expect?
We've lived in a software bubble for so long, most software engineers have completely forgotten that the purpose of (most) software is to solve a problem. If that problem solves the problem well and reliably it doesn't matter the quality of the code.
In fact, that's the entire reason we care about "quality code", because we assume that quality code is code that does what you expect well and consistently.
I say this as someone who hand writes code pretty much every night for fun, just to experiment with computation. Which, oddly, is more fun than ever because I don't feel like there's any need to connect this type of programming with "real world software", and I can really enjoy code for it's own sake, meanwhile my job is mostly just running agent loops (which I quite like as well).
I haven't forgotten that, I affirmatively think it's false. High quality code is necessary to solve problems reliably. Perhaps some people call things code quality when they don't matter (I really don't care what most variables are named), but there have always been teams who try to increase velocity by disregarding code quality, and from what I've seen AI does not stop them from shipping outages constantly.
True, but you should say that about every thing. Does it matter to you how the car drives, as long as it takes you to your destination? Well, yes, it matters: how will it deal with a crash, and if it's possible to replace a part and if anybody can just open it if you leave it outside. I will be amazed if somebody shows me their home-printed car, but if they'll try to sell it to me like a new one...