> there's no reason to reuse it like production code.

This strikes me as a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are probably many people who would like to use the code published with PhD level research, but they don't because the code is not easy to adapt (or sometimes even to get running).

Then a decade later someone implements that same algorithm in a library with a well-designed interface and it suddenly becomes a useful tool for others. So ultimately there was a reason to reuse it, it was the quality of some aspects of the code that held it back.