Myth: code can be ugly as long as it works, don't spend company time on making it look good or on minor optimizations.
The truth is that you can tell when effort has been put into a job. Even if it just works, the lack of discipline means that in the end it will be difficult to maintain and probably will fail in unexpected situations.
Every language has its conventions, but if I spot more than a line of separation between blocks of code, that is a common telltale sign of noob. Run from that shit.
The idea is that often you could be using actual logical separations (functions etc.) instead of whitespace. IMO whitespace has its place though, including for this.
uhh seen this shit with some rewrites with no regards to your code being idiomatic to the point of it all feeling almost verbatim. Like some PHP devs getting confused by the lack of classes in Go and instead of using method receivers and composition over inheritance creating one 250-line behemoth public function to replace a PHP class.
At work I'm currently trying to chop up a 3500 line file into multiple components... separation of concerns, people! To be fair it's like the oldest one we have so there's a lot of cruft in there.