[tester756]

>Can this be avoided for codebases that are old and large? Does anyone know of examples of codebases (public or private) that have maintained a high quality codebase that is large, old, or supported by a large number of contributors? If so, how is it done?

The thing is

if you took 3 x 10 years of experience engineer - one in web app backends, one heavy FP programmer and 3rd one in e.g kernel programming, then they'd have different definitions of "good code"

for web apps it's probably a lot of abstractions/indirections, DDD, patterns, heavy OOP, testability

for kernel code there's nothing wrong with gotos, ugly hacks for performance, 10 meters of ifs, stuff like likely/unlikely