I'd be careful extending learnings from games (solo or team efforts) to general programming as the needs and intent seem to be so different. We rarely see much code re-use in games outside of core, special-purpose buy largely isolated components and assets. Outside of games there's a much bigger emphasis on the data IME, and performance is often a nice-to-have.

Yeah - A game is (generally) a one and done enterprise. Like a start up it's all about getting it out the door, there's little to no expectation of having to maintain it for any real length of time.