[GreenWatermelon]

> if you just hired a straight up incompetent developer, they will likely end up writing unmaintainable spaghetti no matter how much they're pushed in the right direction

I'm currently dealing with a laravel app. Said app has an 18,000 line "AdminController", and a 7k lines "WebController"

These contain all the logic. No, I'm not exaggerating. Model files are empty, save for 4 lines of model declarations. It's a whole CMS written in a SINGLE FILE. of course, such a dumpster fire can't exost without copious amounts of copy-paste, of which there indeed hundreds.

I'm talking multi-levels of nested if conditions, each with many branches, and said branches are very well over 10-20 lines of code that only differ by a single word.

And I won't even get to the disgusting mess that is the view templates... Let's just say they follow the same principles as above, except the original developer was unfortunately constrained by having to create a separate view file for each controller method.