Meh, those are just the programmers that are remembered.
They did lots of dumb shit too. Mario 64 was a super-innovative game at the time with its free 3D platforming. There’s also tons of weird code in there, and the developers also fucked up by shipping a debug build of the game, costing a not insignificant amount of performance.
Yup, they shipped a debug build. Here’s a video that shows the build side-by-side with one that was compiled with compiler optimizations: https://youtu.be/9_gdOKSTaxM
It was quite laggy in certain areas, particularly the submarine sank the framerate quite considerably.