I created a personal philosophy of code awfulness because back in 2012 I worked in a code base that was so bad it completely baffled all my attempts to categorize it.

This and thus is why code is bad. Oh wait a second. They're doing something terrible that's completely orthogonal to the sum total of awfulness encounter so far.

The best (worst?) one was a demonstration mode that the product had. Functions would call functions, one after the other until like 50 calls deep you would wind up where you started. Why didn't the stack blow up? Because they would at seemingly random launch a new thread and abandon the existing stack. This was the main loop.

Simply describing the mess was enough to convince the client to let us rewrite the feature wholesale.

Anyway the point is the same as yours. Slop code is a thing long before our current scenario.