I think the crux here is the OP means the "quality of code" doesn't matter until PMF, only the utility matters (to the extent it helps you find PMF), in which case you're both in violent agreement.

But even then you don't need code. I briefly worked for a startup that found PMF by calling people, sending text messages, creating social media posts, measuring engagement to create reports, and sending invoices... all manually. The "code" as such was a bunch of templates in a doc for each of those. Once they actually started getting paid they moved to writing code.