I have worked on several Python code bases exceeding 500k lines. Not sure why you think that's uncommon.

I've worked on a couple codebases approaching that a few hundred k. But at that point we've usually done major refactor, usually resulting in a codebase with a level of magnitude less lines.

I'm not saying exceeding 500k lines is impossible, but it seems like a very large system for a well written codebase with low duplicity. I would love to see what the codebase looks like for such a system written with Flask.

There are a lot of different types of software being made in python.

I've managed to do python for 10 years only working on one codebase that size, and I'm not sure it counts - it was made by low skilled devs (we were encouraged not to do anything "clever", like use the language features) mostly cutting and pasting existing code.

You've got to love companies that have the don't be "clever" attitude... Whats the point of hiring skilled workers to just dumb them down. I've stopped counting the companies that openly stated, "we don't pay you to think," only to see them stuck in an endless loop of mediocrity.

A company that doesn't pay it's engineers to think is surely doomed from achieving any significant innovation.

Doesn't seem like viable strategy at all, I'd run the other way if I were approach by such a company.

Our policy is to avoid cleverness - think "code golf" - that is going to be opaque and hard to reason about at 2AM when things are on fire. We don't shy away from language features, but if you have a PR with multiply-nested generator expressions, for instance, someone will usually ask you to unroll that into a set of explicit loops.