This person went through their entire career and never have met a bad programmer?

It's not just about the code. It's about delivery. I've worked with devs who are incompetent. I've worked with devs who write wild code for simple tasks.

And the whole "it's just a opinion." Like no?

Joel Spolsky (and his ubuquitous book/blog “Joel on Software”)

This is the first time I'm read this person's name. From the blog author's description, it seems like he has lots to say, but not a lot of it is worthwhile.

"Am I blithely leaving a path of coding carnage that others are forced to clean up?"

I've never seen any evidence that the programmers I hate cleaning up after have ever, even once asked themselves this question.

Edit: Op is probably fine, and I appreciate everyone who takes the time to introspect on the topic.

Also, it's relevant to realize that there are only two types of code, and anyone capable of producing type two and leaving good commit logs will have their name cursed over and over by future developers:

The two types of code:

1. Partial solutions that no one uses, or even really remembers, after a few months.
2. Horrifying legacy solutions that may yet outlive the developers whose nightmares they haunt.

Sometimes a program in category 1 grows up into a program in category 2, like an eldritch horror caterpillar emerging from it's cocoon as an eldritch horror octopus porcupine.

Edit 2: But hey, I heard AI is going to take care of all the coding soon. So that will be nice.

Sounds like a whole lot of programmers have a case of "never mentally graduated from high school" if there's a habit of "witch-hunting" the "baddies". Which... Unsurprising, after a regretted stint in military IT, everything involving rank or seniority looks like high school dynamics to me anymore, and Hacker News is FULL of personalities that project multiple hours of their lives spent stuffed inside a locker onto other people-- I can't help but question if it wouldn't be easier for these would-be witch-hunters to just offer a hand to these "bad" programmers, rather than tearing them down.

Iunno. Maybe I'm expecting too much maturity from modern techbros; and maybe I shouldn't be bothering with the field.