The hilarious thing about this is, of course, that Shakespeare is actually popular culture, we just glorify it because it's older than the word we made for it. And it's good, of course, but praising it as some kind of pop-culture antithesis betrays lack of understanding of culture itself, and is an example of how many people mistake something that extremely mainstream (but 400 years ago) with arthouse movies.

And to return to the issue of code quality, academia is not a magical land of perfect code. Code I read in academia, in scientific and bioinformatics code, was easily one of the worst I ever read, and I currently work on a huge codebase that started 10 years ago as someone's attempt to learn a new programming language. The "best" code comes either from obsession, or from requirements actually going down to the code quality itself — either because it's used for didactics, or because e.g. reliability requirements demand actual proof of correctness (which is rare, but there's some industrial code that actually has this requirement, see Maeslantkering).