I broadly agree with you about improving quality through working together. But even with tons of discussion, they still write code that seems fine from a distance but is weird when you actually get down to actually reading it and thinking about it, line by line. It is not junk but sure as hell I can write tighter and cleaner code and I am a very mediocre programmer. The abundance and frequency of "what, why?!" and "why not just..." reactions I have at LLM code throughout the day has made that much clear to me.

No. Sometimes they produce code that's ok in small units, but definitely not all the time.