Every company I've ever worked with (as a web dev) has had shitty code somewhere, usually huge gobs of it, but as far as I can tell it's never been a business make-or-breaker. It all gets refactored or completely rewritten every few years anyway, or with every new team lead or whatever. I'd say poor code quality is the overwhelming reality in small-med businesses, especially those that aren't directly in tech (i.e. not a SaaS) but still need web code for whatever reason.<p>It's especially bad in web. Not just Javascript, but React and its 30 state management libraries and routing frameworks, most abandoned years ago, that get coupled with npm libs from last decade and terrible patterns invented by twenty different outsourced bootcamp devs.<p>Javascript isn't easier to write (IMHO), but it DOES have a shit ton of employable candidates. People choose React not because it's the best, but because React is the new Wordpress and it's super easy to hire for compared to any other library, framework, or even language.<p>Programming (at least web dev) isn't the art it used to be. It's just another trade skill now, and companies hire commodity coders at bargain-basement prices... it's only going to get worse as more and more of it gets combined with AI generated half-working code.<p>Is anyone going to care? I really doubt it, as long as it lowers overall costs (and it will). Almost every company is going to choose shitty, mostly-working code if it's 2x or 3x cheaper than perfect code.