You haven't worked or serviced any engineering systems, I can tell.

There are fundamental truths about complex systems that go beyond "coding". Patterns can be experienced in nature where engineering principals and "prevailing wisdom" are truer than ever.

I suggest you take some time to study systems that are powering critical infrastructure. You'll see and read about grizzled veterans that keep them alive. And how they are even more religious about clean engineering principals and how "prevailing wisdom" is very much needed and will always be needed.

That said there are a lot of spaces where not following wisdom works temporarily. But at scale, it crashes and crumbles. Web-apps are a good example of this.

I'd argue clean engineering principles (gang of 4 patterns) and clean code are not the same, and are most definitely not mutually exclusive.

> You haven't worked or serviced any engineering systems, I can tell.

I have worked on compilers and databases the entire world runs on, the code quality (even before AI) is absolutely garbage.

Real systems built by hundreds of engineers over twenty years do not have clean code.