How can you possibly know which type of repo you're in ahead of time? My experience is that "temporary" code frequently becomes permanent and I've also been on the other side of those decisions 40 years later.

Unless you’re producing demos for sales presentation (internally or externally), it’s always worth it to produce something good. Bad code will quickly slow you down and it will be a never ending parade of bug tickets.

indeed, being on-call cleanses many developers of slopulist habits

That depends on how quick the feedback loop is for your decisions. If it takes weeks or months to find the impact of your changes, or worse, if you're insulated somehow from those changes, you may not be pushed toward improving the quality of your code.

Lolololol, sorry, I can't help but laugh a bit because some of the most entrenched companies are also the slowest moving.

It depends on their sleep habit, work-life requirements and compensation when they need to be on-call.

When you get a fatter check because your code break, the incentives are not in favor of good code.