[emilsoman]

> What kind of code “looks good” to you? What kind of code “looks ugly”? IMO this is not taste, it's your pattern recognition skill based on what you think is better in terms of correctness, performance and maintainability.

> Which design decisions you feel really good about, and which ones are just fine? It's not just a feeling, it comes from reasoning.

Good taste == good skill isn't it?

When someone chooses a functional lang over an object oriented one - is this because of better taste? They’ve learned, through experience, what kinds of problems map more cleanly to immutability and composition versus encapsulation and state. Their "taste" for one paradigm over another is just a reflection of the skills they’ve built up in recognizing tradeoffs, debugging pain points, and anticipating long-term maintainability. What looks like taste is really just expertise shaping intuition.

I get why the author feels a team member who doesn't align with the team's goals has bad taste. But it's really just this - the opinions they have formed from their experience don't match yours.