“So Good They Can’t Ignore You” makes a lot of good points, but IMO chief among them is building up career capital that you can use to leverage to work on things you’d rather be doing. In this example, you earned so much capital with the boring project that you were able to spend some to work on something you wanted to—obviously higher-ups don’t want to lose a good worker.
And then you have the companies with work cultures that like to boast about doing "interesting" work - in companies like Google you get nowhere doing important, mundane maintenance work. You'll only get promoted for making the new shiny thing even if you're reinventing the wheel - it's the reason any new Google product that's not a main driver of the business gets shelved after a couple of years.
It's a good way to make yourself hard to replace, but they're probably gonna want you to keep doing the thing you're hard to replace at.
There needs to be self-advocacy, a little luck, and the willingness to walk away (just like in any negotiation)