Other way around. I consider myself as someone who writes extremely clean code. I consider many people who write messier code than me as people who are smarter. I self depreciate my own intellectual abilities in service of rationality. I write cleaner code because I am not intelligent enough to write messy code.

Honestly, I detect a thinly veiled personal ire in your response. Perhaps the bias is with you. Perhaps you write clean code and you use it to justify your supposed intelligence. If so, you wouldn't even know it. Such is the nature of bias.

Writing "clean code" is in actuality a simple endeavor with high euphoric rewards. All you're doing when writing "clean code" is following conventions and modularizing your code. It feels good to organize your room just like it feels good to organize your code, but organizing your room is not an intellectual feat just like how writing clean code isn't either. Think about it, cleaning up your own code is really, really easy. To have it function as the pillar of your intellectual self esteem is a weakness.