Not an answer to your question, but some perspective from my own experience.
I worked with a bunch of people like yourself at a fast-paced adtech startup. Clean code and even sustainability were not a priority, and the company had a money printer in the basement. Has the front-end gotten so messy it's unmaintainable? No problem, let's make a new one from scratch! I loved that we were given so much time to solve interesting problems with bleeding-edge tech, but I hated the filth of the code, particularly trying to read other hackers' code. And yes, so extreme was the priority of haste that these engineers were more hackers than anything else. That wasn't really my style, so I left.
Now I work with people who are the opposite. They love fussing about the `describe` blocks in their unit tests, will draw up Excel sheets to supplement the JIRA board, and spend an afternoon arguing about whether that 100% test coverage is really covering all functionality. The codebase is a textbook of how to write beautifully maintainable, readable code. Pull requests are genuinely enjoyable. But ask them to learn a technology from the last 8 years and they just start refining their refactoring tickets.
Perhaps I will find a happy medium between these two extremes.
> I know some people aren't going to like reading this
That's because it's an unpopular opinion in an industry teeming with reclusive and rabidly antisocial people.
But it's one that I subscribe to and indeed all the engineers at the company I work for do, as well. The fact is, at remote jobs I made zero relationships even though the people were generally approachable and easy to talk to. I got one job with a person I already had good relationships and wouldn't you know but our relationship never got much deeper until I flew out to Utah to simply hang out with him.
That was what made me switch to an on-site job, and 14 months in, I think I've made the right decision. Office shenanigans, small talk, an overheard joke are what really make the relationship. To say nothing of breaking bread with your office companions! Who likes eating alone every day? I've also found that the artificiality of Zoom sessions really ruin mundane interactions. I communicated less with people whilst working remotely, and the communications themselves were noticeably less satisfying.
> "Trying to persuade people to avoid technical debt at all costs" - put in a linter and concrete rules (even if a rule is loose, note that in writing) or devs will get upset and think you are singling them out.
I went from a company with no linter or style guidelines and PRs were an absolute nightmare. Eight devs, eight completely different styles, each insisting theirs was right. I wasn't able to turn stones into loaves (i.e. I wasn't a Senior Dev at the time), so my style was categorically incorrect. I switched to a company with an aggressive linter, and all that superfluous debate over tiny patterns and "personal preference" went out the window. I no longer dreaded PRs.
> wolf warrior diplomacy, the aggressive and illegal construction of military bases in disputed waters all over the South China Sea, the interference in US elections, the rampant IP theft along with constant attempts to steal military secrets, along with threats of total war whenever the US sneezes in the direction of Taiwan
Dyed in the wool American here. All of these pale in comparison to the history of our my nation, which has been at war with much of the world for most of its existence. Rampant IP theft is nothing compared to the bombing of civilian infrastructure in Iraq (among other countries in the Middle East) during the 1990s and 2000s, the clusterfuck of atrocities that was the Vietnam War, to say nothing of our extensive support for dictators in Latin America throughout the 20th century. When it comes to interfering with elections (and indeed the results of them), we put China to shame. I love my country, but I can't pretend that our military industrial complex has been anything but a threat to countless other nations and will certainly continue to do so.
This, this, this. When I first heard the statistics bandied about in interviews with this author, my first thought was the quality of the statistics (I won't refer to the numbers using the modern-day honorific "data"). Perhaps this is discussed at length in his book? I have not yet read it.
Last year I worked as a dev at an ad tech firm that apparently had a money printer. The amount of waste, particularly in their cloud architecture, was staggering. Prestigious office in a very expensive city. I noticed that they hired from big-name companies known for being staggeringly wasteful like Uber.
Just one company, sure, but it did make me wonder about adtech in general.