Unfortunately, I've found that almost all developers are incapable of objectively judging the quality of code until they actually have to start working with it and then after a few months they can start to appreciate or despise the code.
It takes a lot of investment from a developer before they can appreciate the beauty of the code... To make matters more confusing, a lot of developers tend to become extremely attached to even horrible code if they spend enough time working with it; it must be some kind of Stockholm syndrome.
I think the problem is partly caused by a lack of diversity in experience; if a developer hasn't worked on enough different kinds of companies and projects, their understanding of coding is limited to a very narrow spectrum. They cannot judge if code is good or bad because they don't have clear values or philosophy to draw from to make such judgements. If you can't even separate what is important from what is not important, then you are not qualified to judge code quality.
If you think that the quality of a project is determined mostly by the use of static vs dynamic types, the kind of programming paradigm (e.g. FP vs OOP), the amount of unit test coverage and code linting, then you are not qualified to judge code quality.
I think that the best metric for code/project quality is simply how much time and effort it takes for a newcomer to be able to start making quality contributions to the project. This metric also tends to correlate with robustness/reliability of the code and also test quality (e.g. the tests make sense and they help newcomers to quickly adapt to the project).
As developers, we are familiar with very few projects. If a developer says that they like React or VueJS or Angular, etc... they usually have such limited view of the whole ecosystem that their opinion is essentially worthless; and that's why no one ever seems to agree about anything. We are all constantly dumbing down everything to the lowest common denominator and regurgitating hype. Hype defies all reason.
It's the same with developers; most developers (especially junior and mid-level) are incapable of telling who is actually a good developer until they've worked with them for about 6 months to a year.
If you are not a good developer, you will not be able to accurately judge/rank someone who is better than you at coding until several months or years of working with them. Sometimes it can take several years after you've left the company to fully realize just how good they were.