I mean, it's your choice, but your loss too.
All the good programmers I know have side projects and live and breathe code. None of the mediocre/bad ones I know do.
Think of it this way: what's likely to make you a better programmer: spending half (0.5x) of every day on (a work-mandated subset of) code or spending most (1x) of every day on code? The answer is obviously the latter.
And it sounds weird, but most of my programming knowledge comes from outside of work, even the knowledge that I apply at work. Maybe it's because work naturally discourages exploration since you're focused on the company's priorities. For example, I'm never implementing a collection in C at work (I use `std::vector` and stuff). Yet doing that in my own time taught me why certain operations invalidate iterators -- a thing senior coworkers of mine didn't understand and which helped us catch a bug. :D
Young me would've enjoyed the process of building a thing, ignoring problems like maintenance burden, how fragile or brittle the new tool is, lessons learned from the old tool, etc. etc. (you know how it goes)
Current me will take a task and mull on it. No pen to paper for _days_, preferring a minor adaptation to the existing process, or discovering that the desire was misguided in the first place. The work not done and wisdom to not do it is worth its weight in gold.
Or people who used to be in their 20s.