A few bad things in code for which we have fairly consistent evidence:

• high nesting depth
• meaningless or single-letter variable names
• lots of code duplication
• very inconsistent formatting
• very complicated Boolean conditions with AND and OR
• functions with a lot of parameters

As a software engineering researcher, I strongly agree. SE research has studied code comprehension for more than 40 years, but for that amount of time, we know surprisingly little about what makes really high-quality code. We are decent in saying what makes very bad code, though, but beyond extreme cases, it’s hard to come to fairly general statements.

While I agree with the general notion of this, there are still companies that are considerably worse than others. Choosing the lesser evil is still something that would overall help society and the planet.