I think the impressive thing would've been you being able to achieve that while coordinating with multiple other people. Anybody can write "perfect" code with enough reading/practice. I think being able to fit your code within the context of a codebase is another skillset entirely and presents entirely different challenges regardless of management influence
One time I used that approach was in a small startup. I was working with frontend contractors, so I collaborated with them on FRs, API design, and bug reports, but it was mostly separate coding-wise. TDD and docs mattered a lot due to the 12hr time diff and language barrier. The only other backend dev came at the end, and I handed the whole thing off to him. Aside from that, business people.
I only write code that's just good enough. My goal was to quickly handle the business requirements that were a bit of a moving target and keep prod stable, and I did. If we had more people, a few parts of it would've been handed off as services that work similarly to my piece. And I know they would've been fine because my system was nothing special or pretentious, just your typical NodeJS/Postgres backends plus a few other pieces. The frontend devs understood it well enough to tweak new features occasionally if I was asleep.
Big Tech(tm) team would've been fine with this too. We have roughly the same-size system and resources I did, and similar relations with internal customers, except 5 backend SWEs instead of 1, and except we're forced to do things the hard way. FRs take forever, and the system is flaky.
