Perhaps it just manifests itself differently, but things like I've always preferred PHP to RoR because the PHP community is so much more practical and "gett'er done" mentality.
For me it's about knowing I've done good work. I don't need external affirmation, it's about _ME_ knowing I've done good work.
I had a good friend tell an allegory about a bricklayer who refused to build a porch for a house that was run down and when asked why the brick layer said he would not be proud of showing the work to his son.
I once built and maintained a system over a 5 year period that after the first 6 months never went down or stopped working unless external dependencies it relied on went down (think mail server going down causing emails to be unsent). It wasn't a simple system either, it deployed across multiple data centers around the world.
I'm quite proud of that work, what I'm most proud of is that no one ever went to work worried that system may prevent them from doing their job. I'm not saying it was completely bug free at all times, new features are always a risk, but it damned well did the core work day and day out and came to be something most employees of the company relied on every single day. That company was sold about 6 months after I left and the owner told me the system I built was one of the things they wanted access to.
I left my last job because their systems were complete and utter shit and the person who originally wrote them wielded enough power that he actively prevented us from fixing it. My problem wasn't the state of the system, my problem was being told I have to work with it like that without being able to improve it. Just to give you an idea, this guy once told me he had been doing it for 20 years and never needed to test on real data. Which is bullshit, when he did it he had access to everything, including production. I left because I'm not willing to not be able to improve a system that needs it that badly.
Long story short, I don't agree with this person description of what a passionate programmer cares about, at all. It feels like a caricature to me. But the amount of times I've seen complete and utter shit pushed as "it doesn't matter" is too high. system stability absolutely matters.