> In the college we've been taught about design patterns and all these responsibilities like domain, application, infrastructure, UI. Domain should never depend on infrastructure or application layer and so on. But the projects I got have domain that depend on infrastructure and another one where application has a reference directly to infrastructure and been told that this is correct implementation... doh..

This is so interesting, we were never taught about any of these things. I think there was one course titled "software engineering" (as part of a 4-year degree) that may have mentioned something similar at one point. But that's about it.

Which country did you study in? It's quite fascinating to me as it's such a surprise that there are places where these kind of "design patterns" are a core part of the degree.

> is it really normal that all the college so called "best practices" go

Most of them yes, because for most of them the answer is "it depends". And if we're going to be technical (and come on, this is computing so we should be) - then really the answer is "it depends" for every single one of them. There is not a single design pattern that applies to all coding domains. Not even "always give your variables descriptive names", and that's probably the one with the highest % of coverage.