I think most "master" software engineers are a bit more idealistic than that... Not saying I am a master but I occasionally write something and consider it genuinely beautiful.
It seems like with Quora you either get very bad or very good answers. The good ones tend to be significantly older, i.e. before it got big and people started to gamify the system.
It's not clear who made Telegram's crypto but it was probably Nikolai Durov who is a genius mathematician and engineer, so it's not like it's some guy in a garage.
I found it interesting that direct calls (just calling one of your contacts) can be peer-to-peer if you enable it in the settings. They even have a unique code at the top of the screen (like 5 emojis) that you can verify match on the other participant's phone.