This - 100%.

Just take a look at some of the opensource academic, infrastructure or "passion-projects", where there is no management pressures to "move fast & break-things" and ship-ship-ship. They tend to be very stable, very predictable - and very high quality.

Care to name any?

I've seen software that academics write. It's no better than average. It's often cut-and-paste code, or these days AI slop. Software is a means to an end in academia, rarely a product in itself.