Author's conclusion that legibility is prioritized over quality implies that static analysis tooling, auto-formatters, and similar linting tools would be practical requirements in all BigCo projects. Auto-formatters improve legibility in nearly all cases, and where engineers are trading off quality to meet deadlines, they are almost never hand-formatting the code intentionally. Static analysis catches common issues made by beginners without deep expertise in the codebase's language.

But I rarely find this to be the case. The decision on whether or not to invest in static analysis tooling is usually made by people managers, not technical managers, and those people managers are loathe to pay short-term costs for non-functional gains when functional priorities have deadlines.

It's really as simple as, deadlines to ship trump all other considerations, including expertise of any kind other than how to ship when working in unmaintained codebases.