I can confirm that that was the general mindset back then, and I think that's what made the project last for 20 years. I myself ended up doing some monkey-patching for the admin interface on 0.92 (or 0.91? it's been a lot of time since then), all as the result of me going through the source-code. Definitely not the cleanest solution, even back then, but it made one getting to know the underlying code so much more.
Sure, I thought, this'll be fun.
Holy shit. It was something I'd started working on in the aforementioned 0.9x days, and which someone else had, uh, "extended and modified" after I left the web dev place where I'd worked at the time. Remarkably it was still pretty understandable.
I didn't want anything to do with the person that ran the site, not even just to take money off them, so I passed on it.