You are not piling on, you are making an incredibly important point. Are Olympic athletes passionate about their sports? To the exclusion of practice, training, and hard work? Come on.
Perhaps a better example is going for a doctorate. Everyone with a PhD will tell you the critical requirement for getting a PhD (if they're being honest) is neither raw intelligence (beyond what you needed for the primary degree), nor passion for the topic, but the dedication to spend four to six years of your life in the focussed, deliberate and pragmatic pursuit of a goal. Passion will do nothing but cripple your efforts - you have to remain objective, be able to drop an approach if it's not proving useful without a second thought, and not get married to the central thesis lest it distort your results.
Same principle applies to programming. Dedication, professionalism, these are the real virtues - passion just produces fanboys for whatever the method de jour is.
Passion is not entirely orthogonal to the result. And further to your discussion of PhDs, there are many PhDs whose work contributes little of importance to history. The great dissertations are from those who are passionate and dedicated.
Sure, enthusiasm by itself is not helpful. Nobody serious about hiring hires passion without anything else. But I haven't read anybody saying "Hire people who are enthusiastic without accomplishing anything." So why argue that point?
The OP makes the point that passion correlates negatively with performance. This is bunk.