It's because of comments like this that it's almost impossible to have a critical conversation about culture.
The parent comment is describing a cultural trope that frames the way people behave in that part of the world. There is a lot of pressure to work towards making money. That doesn't mean 100% of people are necessarily following the priorities set out by their society but it does mean that it makes a maker culture much more difficult there. It's inherently counter-cultural.
NASA is so prestigious that they basically can get away with paying everyone very little. They aren't stuck with bottom of the barrel people even though they pay them bottom of the barrel wages.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I don't think more funding would really change much (other than allow them to fund more projects, but I'd argue that there are some serious diminishing returns at this point)
""non-standard" bits of the language start leaking into your code"
I work on a small team (C++), so this has never been an issue. If you break coding guidelines someone will notice and let you know.
But this really should be integrated into work-flows. (ie/ into Gitlab, Jira, etc.) There should be some kind of step - before you are allowed to merge code - that checks that you are withing coding guidelines.
The parent comment is describing a cultural trope that frames the way people behave in that part of the world. There is a lot of pressure to work towards making money. That doesn't mean 100% of people are necessarily following the priorities set out by their society but it does mean that it makes a maker culture much more difficult there. It's inherently counter-cultural.