I wouldn't call it love per se, but it certainly does take a special kind of empathy to put yourself in the shoes of someone using your software, and to use that perspective to make a great product.
This philosophy is succinctly summarised in the book Peopleware:
> local control of design by those who will occupy the space
Unfortunately this aspect of Alexander's philosophy of letting the users participate in the design, construction or customisation of building and towns was ignored, while the other idea of design patterns became very popular when adapted to software.
Some software is built for a market where the buyers are the end-users to software. Other software is built for markets where the purchasing decision is made by a committee of stakeholders, perhaps excluding the people who will be the day to day users of the software. If you contrast the two in terms of usability, you can start to appreciate what Alexander was getting at.
Minecraft has some of these elements, and is why it is fun for people.
Arguably, Roblox is the largest scale example, though my understanding is that it is still not so easy that end users can really participate in creating their own designs.
The benefits would be endless, and they'd "cut their teeth" on solving crunch problems for themselves/their teams.
Do you have a particularly large team? Or a particularly good process for 'onboarding' new/less-experienced engineers?
Sounds like a lot of things are going right at your company for your team to have picked up several developers this way.
What I would advise is treating each job as a college course which you also happen to be paid for. For me, this meant not allowing myself to become emotionally invested in the work, taking good notes about what I learned each day, and looking for a new job (typically with a raise) once those notes were sparse for too long.
"Right livelihood" is a thing. It might not be easy but you should.