Your intuition is correct, not all best practices are equally important. e.g.
1. Business data should be stored in a proper relational database such as Postgres, with a well-normalized schema. This is critical; if you don't do it before the first day in production, inconsistent data will accrue and then it's too late to solve your problems just by fixing your code.
2. Your code should be well formatted, properly indented, with variable names that are informative but not too long. This will end up being important, but if you neglect it initially, you can fix it up later, so it doesn't have to be right upfront.
3. Your code should be commented where appropriate. This is good to have, but if you neglect it initially, you can add comments later, and even if you never get around to that, you can probably work well enough without them, so if you find you don't have time to write comments, don't sweat it.
For any practice whatsoever, you can find people who will insist it's do-or-die critical (I've seen people insist uncommented code needs to die in a fire along with its authors),so you have to use your judgment to distinguish between things where you have to make a stand and things you can let slip.
1. Business data should be stored in a proper relational database such as Postgres, with a well-normalized schema. This is critical; if you don't do it before the first day in production, inconsistent data will accrue and then it's too late to solve your problems just by fixing your code.
2. Your code should be well formatted, properly indented, with variable names that are informative but not too long. This will end up being important, but if you neglect it initially, you can fix it up later, so it doesn't have to be right upfront.
3. Your code should be commented where appropriate. This is good to have, but if you neglect it initially, you can add comments later, and even if you never get around to that, you can probably work well enough without them, so if you find you don't have time to write comments, don't sweat it.
For any practice whatsoever, you can find people who will insist it's do-or-die critical (I've seen people insist uncommented code needs to die in a fire along with its authors),so you have to use your judgment to distinguish between things where you have to make a stand and things you can let slip.