Maybe you haven't looked very often but nice code is out there for quite some time. Take a look at anything related to the GNOME stack (GLib, GTK+, all the applications) or the Linux kernel for example. And quite frankly, I stumble upon badly written Python way more often than C.
The code for those might be great, but Redis is beautiful inside and outside. I'm not a fan of the actual output of the GNOME stack. I agree the Linux kernel code is generally great to read and to use.