[thu2111]

That's true in a way but with the huge caveat that cleanliness of a home is very objective. Everyone recognises and agrees when a home is very clean or very dirty.

Software architecture isn't like that at all. Developers routinely have massive fights and disagreements over whether something is clean or not. One person's clean is another person's over-engineered monstrosity.

This changes the equation quite a bit. In any sufficiently big team either one person has to be top dog and enforce their personal perception of clean on a perhaps unwilling team. Or you have to flex and tolerate multiple competing definitions in a codebase, which if you have "clean freaks" in the team can lead to constant pointless refactoring and rewriting.