Yes, there are large negative externalities to a certain type of engineers who write a lot of code of dubious quality. Even after ignoring all the trivial cases of "artificial code stuffing", etc.
I used to work in a very dysfunctional org where the main "architect" was writing lots of broken code that kinda works, and the 20+ people in the team around it would basically be full time in fire fighting mode. The architect was a very smart guy but ironically enough without any sense of architecture: his level of abstraction for network was pushing bytes through a pipe, and for loops for calculations.
That was similar to this guy - he was a good IC who ended up being over-promoted to an "architecture" role (L7). He didn't really know how to architect things, so he went for creating externalities while resurrecting old, dead projects that past people had designed for him.
I used to work in a very dysfunctional org where the main "architect" was writing lots of broken code that kinda works, and the 20+ people in the team around it would basically be full time in fire fighting mode. The architect was a very smart guy but ironically enough without any sense of architecture: his level of abstraction for network was pushing bytes through a pipe, and for loops for calculations.