I mostly agree, however experienced a different challenge exactly for the very reason of consistency:
I used to work within the Chromium codebase (at the order of 10s of million LOC) and the parts I worked in were generally in line with Google's style guide, i.e. consistent and of decent quality. The challenge was to identify legacy patterns that shouldn't be imitated or cargo-culted for the sake of consistency.
In practice that meant having an up to date knowledge of coding standards in order to not perpetuate anti-patterns in the name of consistency.
I'm still having a hard time comparing US salaries across continents. I used to halve SF salaries to arrive at the EUR equivalent for purchasing power parity. In addition to that, median salaries are a poor summary statistic due the "Trimodal Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe" [0]
> The "sufficient explanation of the goals/problem" is the code—anything less is totally insufficient.
somewhat in that spirit, I like Gerald Sussman's interpretation of software development as "problem solving by debugging-almost right plans", in e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MYzvQ1v8Ww