>Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code. Yea, idk about that one. They definitely did care in the past. They had to if they wanted to get users. But they've stopped caring a good while ago. Especially Microsoft. The costs that bad code would bring them is lower than the cost of developping good code, because they can mostly rely on monopolies and anti-competitive practices for user retention. Their users are more like hostages than anything else.

Is Google much better? I don't see, for example, the care that used to go into the quality of organic search results.

They seem fine with the output of the current hodge-podge of the original algorithm results plus massaging by many downstream ML pipelines that run one after the other without context of how each stop might affect the next.