Maybe "care" would have been more appropriate than "effort".

Not even "care". The result is the only thing that matters. If at a first glance the source code of a project doesnt look pretty or whatnot odds might be that the reader landed on particularly nasty chunk or that it was indeed as complicated as the code itself. In my view this test is better done after the overall functionality of the software has been proven. Honestly if libraries with fancy benchmarks don't solve the business problem, I won't care much how clean their code is or if its written in Rust.