I agree with your analysis, but please notice that this new trend has completely redefined the idea of programming job, to the extent that, had I known about it in advance (say, 30 years ago), I wouldn't have chosen this profession in the first place. So the honest advice to "well intentioned types" (as you put it) is to switch to something else, otherwise you will feel miserable for the rest of your life. (I just bring your post to logical conclusion, which I happen to agree with entirely)
It makes me a little sad to read this because I don't think there are zero opportunities for jobs where quality is the absolute priority. People write code for medical devices for example. In which case you have a legal obligation and an ethical obligation to write the highest quality code possible.
I wasn't making the case that we should always abandon quality. Just that we understand its relative importance to other business requirements. That we don't build a $2,000 lock for a $10,000 safe to protect $1.
I'd like to think the majority of code I write is high quality. I am proud of most of the code I write. And I spend a lot of time helping junior devs refactor their code to be more robust, deal with edge cases, and be more maintainable, etc.
I've also been in the industry for a few decades now, and I'm more excited than ever about the opportunities for quality. The code we were writing in COBOL back in the day is nowhere near the level of quality of code that can be written today. Hell, we weren't even measuring bugs and quality back then.
I encourage you to have a look around for opportunities where your employer's values and goals are better matched to your own values and goals. If you are super interested in software correctness, you shouldn't be building throw-away websites for short-lived marketing campaigns. But that doesn't mean those jobs aren't important too. Just that you shouldn't be the one doing them.
