Is that so? How was the codebase at Google like before readability requirement was established at Google? Remember that Google was founded in 1998 while the readability requirement for CLs were not established until some time tin 2016 or 2017.

Another thing to think about is that readability is only a thing for people who contribute to the piper codebase (or whatever its name is). Folks who use Git with Gerrit don't really need to have readability to merge code as long as they have the approval from their peers. Does it make the code of people who use Gerrit at Google worse or maybe of lower standard than the rest of the company? Or does it cause more bugs?