Agreed. I found that many developers, in the pursuit of clean code, lost slight of some of the fundamentals principles of good code. I found that people were eschewing readability and modularity and calling it clean code.

Clean code became the target, not the underlying principles and the reason why we needed clean code in the first place. It became an entirely new thing that aided in producing some of the worst code I've read.

Oftentimes, when devs talk about "clean code" it's a red flag for me in hiring. Some of the worst devs I've worked with have been clean code evangelists.