I tend to find that this perspective comes from people working on relatively small or isolated projects.

On a large system, the customer being happy today isn’t enough. You need other engineers to be able to understand the system.

Have you ever been on call and been woken up in the middle of the night to fix a production incident in a system you didn’t write?

If everything you build is small, isolated and easy to replace (basically fire-and-forget), then yeah... who cares? Ship the ugly thing, get paid and move on.

If you’re going to be working on something for the next 5+ years, you should definitely spend some time thinking about what you’re doing.