We seem to be in a moment that values more terrible engineers in volume than non-terrible engineers.

To me, it sounds very likely that if you're a not-terrible engineer, you won't be rewarded by that effort. Instead, you'll be hired or leveraged for value in the same batch as several other mixed-quality engineers, and rewarded as a maybe-terrible engineer.

Maybe I just want to be non-terrible if there's a viable reward for doing that.

That goes for jobs (you are hired to do something etc) and also for work like free software, open source, even portfolio work (stuff you do to display your skills). Maybe you want to do just enough to show that you can be a non-terrible engineer if the reward for acting that way is guaranteed, which today, it isn't (in my opinion).