100% agreed, and you made me realize something.
As someone who writes — I mean prose, whether fiction or not (mostly not: essays, technical, etc) — I had to come to terms quite early with the dichotomy you explain here.
There is a place for the "beautiful language", the parts of it and the ways of using it that make it a pleasure, as a writer and as a reader. This, unsurprisingly, usually demands a whole lot of additional work on top of the 'direct meaning'.
Then there's a place, in casual communication, in business, in marketing, in essays as well, in technical docs, in speeches, in a lot of places, for the 'direct meaning', or close to that. The efficient use of language, when all form recedes in favor of meaning, of concepts, of getting that 'other' to get what you mean.
It's just that, in human language, you do it all with the same tools, we use formal or topical subsets of a vastly larger ensemble. In programming, we're more likely to use different languages [themselves subsets of human language if you think about it, but let's forget that for the sake of simplicity].
And there are programmers among us who love to dabble in the form, like some writers would spend 10%, twice, ten times the effort crafting just "better form" over an already well-defined idea/story. While other programmers, or at other times, just focus on getting things done. Cue the spectrum in-between.
So it all depends what we put in our code, as programmers, as human beings I guess. Is that thing a personal statement? Or is it just garbage code to temporarily expedite some roadblock? How do we approach complexity, bottom-up from the simplest elements/code, or top-down with the most expressive almost-meta entities? Maybe some side-line out-of-the-box angle? See how we'd word all of these, in human languages, as in code. We just wouldn't say the same, nor code (select languages) the same.
I don't know if I explained it well. But looking at it from a human language writer, it all seems clear now. The whole rat race of languages, the churches, the sheer effort put into form when meaning has already been solved 10 times by others, the strong NIH syndromes... it's all so common in traditional writers circles. We're all just writers, really!