What was meant was moderation. Shopify works with developers to ensure the plugin's code will be compatible/quality more similar to how Apple does moderation.
You are saying that programming is the same as an instruction manual? Programming is art. Nearly every objective in programming will have over a million potential implementations. Personality, wisdom, and mood are in every program (obviously there are some Hello World exceptions) just like artistic writing and nothing like an instruction manual. Machine code is an instruction manual compiled by a computer, a program is a piece of art created by humans.
well no. You can write artistic code, people do that in coding all the time (in programming contests, sample code, your own code etc) but the real goal of writing code is to perform a certain task. The execution of those instructions is what matters, not the style of how the code written.