I think, sadly, that's often "the job". My career has been good so far, all things considered, but I think it would probably be better if embracing that idea came more naturally to me.

One of my first strange and unpleasant realizations in transitioning from studying computer science to "working in the real world" came in a 1:1 meeting with my manager at my first job out of school. I was complaining about code quality both in the context of some of our existing codebases and some new code one of my peers (also a junior developer) had recently written. When the light bulb finally lit up in my naive little head, the question I asked my manager with a sense of horror and outrage was "... so you're saying they wrote bad code on purpose?". The painful thought was that I, too, would (or had already) found myself tasked with pushing code that I knew sucked, for reasons entirely unrelated to architecture or design or other purely "technical" constraints.

I used to fantasize about moving into a different software niche, maybe in safety critical systems, where correctness is more highly valued. But recently I'm coming to realize that the thing I crave (and miss from my school days) is the joy of the craft— something involving elegance and taste in a way that even the strictest standards of correctness doesn't necessitate.

I think for the most part, truly excellent code isn't something many businesses perceive themselves as needing (even if many practical benefits can flow from its virtues). And, probably, for many businesses, such indifference is right. So excellent code, where it exists, is probably more often "gotten away with", half-snuck in by stubborn engineers who are productive enough to burn time injecting some extra consideration and effort into their code, than it is commissioned by a business which understands that it wants good code.