I missed the bullet point that showed beauty as a dimension of code… Perhaps the beauty the quoted text was referring to meant that the code was robust and/or flexible.
My guess (hope, actually) would be that if you spent 3 days writing code it would be robust, beautiful and flexible.
As far as coding ‘if (s == “”)’ I’d much prefer using String.IsNullOrEmpty because, in nearly all instances, you don’t want a null value treated like a populated string which is exactly what you would get with that check.