It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Technology management has given up on the idea that code can actually be read, so it's write-once. Reading Code is that ghetto where you put untalented people you want to fire, or young/new people you don't know what to do with yet. Otherwise, the idea that people can actually read code has been given up on. That, of course, generates a class of programmers who never improve and write terrible (illegible) code.

If your attitude is that reading code is a lost cause, you'll create a bunch of shitty, illegible code.

People forget that outside of the corporate world, there actually is code that people (a) enjoy reading, and (b) write with the intention of making it comprehensible.