[einpoklum]

> And then you end up with a quagmire nobody wants to volunteer to clean up.

Not only that, but the rookie developers coming in get inculcated into that. That's what they're used to, and they have all the motivation to continue writing poor code, because they need to avoid their better code clashing with what's already written - clashing compilation-wise and style-wise.

Of course, it's not 100% all bad, there are gradual improvements in some aspects by some developers.

[fsloth]

The upshot is that generally relevant C++ codebases become decades old - there should be enough time to eventually become competent.