Toward the end of its life, Dreamweaver's code was quite readable. Webflow today is kind of an equivalent, and also puts out relatively readable HTML. I think most of the reputation comes from people looking at its early output.
I once spent a week as an intern building a really clean and well done java swing UI options panel for a portion of our team's app. I was so proud of myself and thought it was so clear and concise and great. I told my manager it was all finished.
Well, no one else on the team was that familiar with java swing so they couldn't work with it, so one of my coworkers had to spend an hour rebuilding the panel in the UI builder that the rest of the app worked in. It produced a perfectly functional UI that had all the features requested and could be maintained by anyone on the team. Sure, the raw java file was twice as long, but who cares? It gets compiled.
I was enlightened on that day. "Elegant" is worthless in most cases. Five years later that entire app was rebuilt as a web app and nobody gave a shit whether one of it's option panels was artisanally hand crafted with care and love or spit out by an actually really good and regularized UI builder.
We are data plumbers. Nobody cares if the pipes you laid out are arranged to look like the mona lisa, and it's probably worse for the customer and maintenance that way anyway.
