> Of course, you might find that your perfectly clean code isn't as helpful as you expected, depending on what you see as "clean."

Yes, readable code is the winner. Not "ultra compact" or "so elegant you can't understand it". I once refactored an elegantly written but heavily opinionated codebase for a large feature - and my goal was to hand it off without any downstream complaints - so I doubled the LoC and the team that received it was very happy with all the non-terse logic and detailed comments (good code is self-explanatory on how it works, but not often on why it's there)