To the folks posting comments suggesting they are 50+ and still going strong or started coding when they were children: kudos to you. However, I think you represent the minority.
Development shouldn't be a 'King of the Mountain' contest, but it is. Here's my story: I have commercial experience in C, Java, Visual Basic, MUMPS/M/Cache and Node.js. I've worked in Healthcare ( A/R, Laboratory reporting & instrument data acquisition ), Integration Space (e.g. webMethods), US defense space. I've worked in a 'tools' team delivering components used by application development teams.
On the side, I've written an open source project on Github, I've attended many meetups in recent years - and user group meetings before the Internet was a thing.
My point, is that I am very experienced. I've never had a bad review, I've worked for at least 15 different managers, I've worked at a few companies multiple times.
Yet, I still struggle daily to hang on to the thing I love which is to write code. From my perspective, this is a real problem. It seems impossible to simply be a developer for your career because the pressure from the industry is to cut developer labor costs.
Btw, I am currently an Senior Architect. I've held many titles since 1988 including Princial Architect and Junior Programmer Trainee. ( I got into software after starting off as a lab technician in healthcare. )
The only people I know who are my age are those folks who truly are kings of their mountain. This is not what I envisioned. I helped raise a large family ( 5 children ), but I am constantly working in my head - regardless of whether I am at the keyboard or not.)
This is not what I expected; however, I've been paid very well, so I've been lucky - or my family has.
I also believe smart people will do dumb things from time to time - especially under the pressure of deadlines. It's always good to assume they were having a bad day.
I know what does not work - printing out a "team-mate"'s code and pinning it to your cube wall w/o even asking a question about it. That goes in the bucket of things I thought I'd never see in the workplace.
Maybe Russ wasn't sneaky - especially since he said it was early in his career? Maybe he fixed it thinking everyone would 'high-five' him for the win. Unfortunately, he didn't understand the political ramification at the time.
I've tried your approach. In my experience, the outcome depends on the person who has created the mistake - not the person who fixed it. Yes, be gentle with the solution, but that will not solve the problem if the person you are dealing with does not share your sentiments.
I had a similar experience and similar results. Someone wrote code to perform 1000 queries to pull back 1000 rows in a specific order rather than issue one query and let the Java collection order the results. Amazingly, another person wrote more logic to add a switch to skip this step because it literally took 10 minutes for the app to start when connected over VPN. The fix was trivial and startup time went from 10 minutes to 300 milliseconds. Being the new guy coupled with the fact they had actually lived with this for years, I was immediately hated.