Well I'm not a coder so maybe my opinion doesn't count, but I did help build digitalocean so I know a little about them. I think the reason so many people don't feel embarrassed is simpler and less sinister than a lack of integrity... they jsut never had the relationship to craft that you have. You very clearly care about the decisions.. you care where the function goes, errors up and down stream the accumulation of small choices that make something yours!! From what I've seen that's a craftsman's relationship to work. It's valid, it's fair, and it's commendable. That said: most people who work generally, including writing code don't have that. They never did. Before LLMs they were copying from stackoverflow without understanding it, which by your own definition was already the problem. But another thing I learned in art school, at great craftsman never blames their tools, the existence of people who use a tool badly has never been a good argument that the tool is the problem. As i said earlier, film school was full of people passing off purchased presets as their own creative work. They weren't shameless because Final Cut existed. They were shameless because they were shameless!!! lol The dean told me to stop fixating on them but because it was consuming energy I could've spent on my own work. An extreme, but just like I accept gay people are gay when I'm stright, trans people are trans when I'm cisgender, I accept other people are not like me and find joy in very many divergent places, and I am nobody to judge another's joy in life.