I was not saying anywhere that people don't or shouldn't care about the quality of their code. I was just pointing out that, whether we like it or not, "quality" is just one of the factors that goes into the mix of "things to optimize of". Other factors like "time" and "effort" and "efficiency" and "compatibility" and even trivial stuff like "familiarity" play a role - or else you'd have formal proofs written in TLA+ or Alloy or the like, before writing any system; And you'd have people immediately switch to safer languages like Rust (which is obviously not happening at scale).

The GCC/Webkit examples were not the best examples, but were nevertheless easily available examples that made one particular point: OP's comment was self-contradictory.