The truth is that most codebases are really crappy, because, as the author describes here, the rewrite to address technical debt is always in the future, and most tech bloggers encourage people to believe it's not just acceptable, but good, to slap together any old crap to get it out the door fast. The reality is that if all your practice is in slapping any old crap together, you will be slow at writing quality code, if you can do it at all.