When people say “taste,” what they actually mean is experience. Pattern recognition built up over years of doing the work. But calling it “taste” instead of “experience” does something subtle and harmful: it makes a learnable skill sound like a gift.
Yeah it’s clearly more than just experience. It’s at least experience + actually learning + actually caring. I wouldn’t rule out natural talent either, though I have seen plenty of smart people with poor programming taste.
For example I worked on a C++ SDK where the guy that wrote it was clearly very smart… But he had also written an enormous god object using CRTP to inherit about 20 classes. The aim was to make it somehow modular, but it absolutely wasn’t. Clearly poor taste.
Maybe it’s like religion. There are plenty of very smart people that believe in an imaginary friend. It’s almost orthogonal to “smartness”. Maybe taste is the same.