I think your second sentence is actually the key here - first time. If you do something day in day out for 20 years there’s no surprise if it works.
Thankfully, there’s plenty of room in the domain of programming for someone to go from seasoned expert to absolute beginner and experience the joy all over again.
The Japanese inter-related concepts of Kaizen, Muri, Muda, Mura, Hansei, and Ikigai are relevant here, I believe. Except for the most mundane, immediately-automatable "something", I have always found an area for improvement and thus, delight. Though Feynman commented there is plenty of room at the bottom about the physical world, considering his life history I believe he would also concur about the cognitive world.
I'm sure if I asked my caucasian wife she'd say something about exoticism.
I liken the more pedestrian words to the words I use to get myself to the gym. Instead of muttering "perseverance", I mumble "find a way". I pick the pedestrian words when they resonate with me in some contexts, and the five dollar words when they resonate more.
I believe there is beauty, wonder, and endless improvement within attention to detail to be found in honing the same craft repeatedly over the years. There Is Plenty Of Room at the Bottom. Jiro Dreams of Sushi is one of my favorite movies that touches upon this.
But doing roughly the same thing for 20 years it can get wearing - it's a different form of brainwork at that point.
My impression is that if you constantly do "exciting" stuff you burn out at work. It isn't like school where you do new things all the time but they give you plenty of time to internalize stuff. So people eventually just accept the easy situation where they are comfortable and don't have to do new exciting things.
Recently I made a small music player and till now I have played several songs on it just because the software is programmed by me!
One time we were doing a math test in the computer room with Apple IIes and we were allowed to use them as our calculator. I finished the test early, so I thought, what program can I write in the five to ten minutes I have that would be neat? I ended up just making the screen fill with random characters. I was so proud to get it to work.
In high school I even wrote assembly code in the library on some loose leaf paper as I once was gripped with a really neat idea I had to express.
Honestly, my teenage years were filled with moments like these when I first learned to code.
I feel like the people going before me are the "ninja coders" I see in job ads. With all my years of experience I come up with various ways to solve a problem, but these guys are so much more effective than me in anticipating my moves and have a way to block them already.
Finding an elegant solution to a problem in isolation is usually quite easy because you can ignore all the edges that make it hard. Finding an elegant solution to something within the constraints of where the problem actually lies is what separates great developers from the rest of us.
Memories? I still do that to this day :)