That code.golf page sure is hard to navigate – can you actually see people's solutions on there?

No! If you could, there would be no competition. :) Unfortunately, the original code golf competition web site in Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP is now gone from the web forever and they never published any solutions ... though you can see some of them in my PM code golf nodes (especially the six part series "The golf course looks great ...").

You can see the (handful) of published solutions for the 12 days of christmas game at the shinh golf link ... no surprise to see the leading one there starting with:

use Compress::Zlib;print uncompress 'x\xda\xe5 ...
[download]

Note that this solution would not have been accepted at the original code golf competition web site because modules were not allowed in those competitions - though you could use compression via the pack function as described in excruciating detail at Compression in Golf: Part I.

The tricky problem of how long to keep the competitor's solutions a secret is touched upon in The golf course looks great, my swing feels good, I like my chances (Part IV) in the "No Time Limit" and "Golfer Burn Out" sections ... and also (update) in Re^2: The golf course looks great, my swing feels good, I like my chances (Part I).

In our early golf games, run on the fwp and golf perl mailing lists, the solutions were kept secret for one week - see Dueling Flamingos: The Story of the Fonality Christmas Golf Challenge for an example of a classic one week Perl code golf competition (with cash prizes!) from the good old days.