I suspect that for some of these people, the reason they don't care is that they know it is fairly likely that their code won't last long, regardless of how awesome it might be. They will move on to other projects, possibly other jobs, and/or someone will decide it's time for a rewrite in a new language/framework, or whatever. Or the company will decide to flush their work and move to an outside provider, or to a different tool.
Some people's way of dealing with that is to just not get too attached to their code.
I'm not saying that all code is short-lived. Most developers I know deal with at least some code that's been around since dirt. But there is also a fair amount that gets left behind rather quickly, and neither of those scenarios necessarily has anything to do with the quality of the code nor the suitableness of it to the task at hand.
Not to mention that most of us have had projects we put a lot of effort into, that fulfilled the requirements, and was done on time, only to have it rarely ever (and sometimes never) used by the people who asked for it.
I think it's possible to either care too much about your code (in the sense that you often have no control over what's done with it in the long run, and you need to be able to accept that), or to care too little about it (if you're going to bother writing it, at least try to as good a job as you can under the circumstances).
Some people's way of dealing with that is to just not get too attached to their code.
I'm not saying that all code is short-lived. Most developers I know deal with at least some code that's been around since dirt. But there is also a fair amount that gets left behind rather quickly, and neither of those scenarios necessarily has anything to do with the quality of the code nor the suitableness of it to the task at hand.
Not to mention that most of us have had projects we put a lot of effort into, that fulfilled the requirements, and was done on time, only to have it rarely ever (and sometimes never) used by the people who asked for it.
I think it's possible to either care too much about your code (in the sense that you often have no control over what's done with it in the long run, and you need to be able to accept that), or to care too little about it (if you're going to bother writing it, at least try to as good a job as you can under the circumstances).