Those two views aren't necessarily opposites. Your old code can be hard to read, and other people's code can simply be even more difficult to understand than that.
The ability to understand it when it's pointed out is unrelated to the ease of spotting it among a thousand lines of other code when you don't know what you're looking for.
I am totally surprised that "reading code" is not really appreciated even at FAANG companies though very likely that is one of the most important things they will end up doing.
Mostly it's not the clever code that is the problem, but the way people tend to use it. Instead of covering that clever piece code in a structure with an easy-to-understand interface and a lot of documentation explaining what things allow this to work properly, it's left without any clues what it is and how it works. Essentially a puzzle in the middle of code base to solve for everyone reading.
It is a good thing if code is readable by people who only know the language a little, only know similar languages, or have not used the language for years.
Years of language-lawyering really refined our own understanding of what is and isn't correct code. Any older code is just so full of UB that they can barely be said to be valid code.
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