Code quality and how often it is read are mostly orthogonal.
You can have an stinky old piece of legacy software that no one ever reads because that system is deprecated and slowly getting phased out, and we can live with it in the meanwhile.
You can have the most elegant a beautiful piece of code that gets read a lot, because it is in the critical path of a very active and rapidly evolving system, and people need to reference, modify and extend it a lot.
However there is a crucial way where OP is wrong: there is a pull and push between code quality and how often it is read. If your code is a legacy big ball of mud, people will be less inclined to touch it, probably going to the extend of rewriting the whole thing. On the other hand when code is well written, people are less afraid of digging into it.
Lastly, even if OP thesis was correct, I don't know think it would change anything. Strive to write the best code you can within reasonable constraints, independently of how much other will read it (which in my experience is almost always underestimated).
You can have an stinky old piece of legacy software that no one ever reads because that system is deprecated and slowly getting phased out, and we can live with it in the meanwhile.
You can have the most elegant a beautiful piece of code that gets read a lot, because it is in the critical path of a very active and rapidly evolving system, and people need to reference, modify and extend it a lot.
However there is a crucial way where OP is wrong: there is a pull and push between code quality and how often it is read. If your code is a legacy big ball of mud, people will be less inclined to touch it, probably going to the extend of rewriting the whole thing. On the other hand when code is well written, people are less afraid of digging into it.
Lastly, even if OP thesis was correct, I don't know think it would change anything. Strive to write the best code you can within reasonable constraints, independently of how much other will read it (which in my experience is almost always underestimated).