you should not be a 10x engineer or whatever, you should be focusing on the vision and ideas and emotions that make your project interesting and beautiful and touching. some of the greatest indie games of all time have absolutely nightmarish codebases because the creator was rightly focused on the player experience
sometimes i feel like it's a controversial game dev opinion that these things are not at odds
you're so much more able to focus on the player experience if you plan and build your tech properly. i see just as much "we can't do what we want creatively because of tech corners we cut earlier" as "we sabotaged our creativity by getting bogged down in tech perfectionism"
of course until they mess it up a few times nobody can plan and build their tech properly so this is still great advice for most folks i guess
the most hazardous part of someone's technical journey from "i don't know what the fuck i'm doing but here's a game" to "i know exactly what i'm doing and am unambiguously good to have on a team" is the middle part where you're like "ah! i will make this system once, and share it between all my projects, saving me time and turning me into a game production machine!" but only think you have the remotest idea how to do that while also being dead set certain it's the right move every time
that bit lasts years, sometimes forever
