I think taste is the ability to adopt the set of engineering values that fit your current project.

map and filters looks good in JS for arrays, but they are absent in Golang for example. "[...] it would be far too arrogant for me to say that engineers who prefer for loops are simply less skilled. In many cases, they have technical capabilities that I don’t have. They just care about different things. In other words, our disagreement comes down to a difference in values."

About arguing the best solution:

Even if the big technical debates do have definite answers, no working software engineer is ever in a position to know what those answers are, because you can only fit so much experience into one career.

Almost every decision in software engineering is a tradeoff, and immature engineers are too inflexible about their taste.

The taste is a mix of priorities over resiliency, speed, readability, correctness, flexibility, portability, scalability and development speed. There are many other engineering values: elegance, modernness, use of open source, monetary cost of keeping the system running, and so on. All of these are important, but no engineer cares equally about all of these things.

A bad taste means values that are not a good fit for the project.

good taste is the ability to select the right set of engineering values for the particular technical problem you’re facing