Your point doesn't quite follow from the example. If the dev is interested in sports unrelated to baseball (tennis, soccer, etc) they'd need the scoring explained regardless.
You don’t argue for 10 minutes that your way of displaying a box score is better than how literally millions of fans expect it to be.
Regardless, a quick "we need this score box to be laid out exactly this way, because this is the standard in this particular fandom, and our fans will expect to read it this way" should be sufficient. A developer who doesn't accept that, and argues, needs to mature and learn some social and professional skills.
I mean, yeah, you've described it well. I can understand how it works. But I just can't imagine working as a developer where the first introduction to a "task" is this finely specified. Like, this dev won't have been involved in the feature at all before seeing it in a card in some task manager app?
Yikes.
Are you saying that you've worked in places like this? Just doing these tiny little tasks, blind, to an app that you have no context on. And you did this for more than, say, a week before quitting? And that week wasn't your first week of your first job out of school?
Even if the developer is involved in the UI design (which at many shops is -- IMO wisely -- not the case), it takes all of 7 seconds to give context on why a box score needs to be displayed in a particular way.
What if there's a couple of different factions in a fandom for some particular sport that disagree on the ordering?
Imagine doing this for any other industry and expecting coherent results. An effective developer given a vague tasking will do a bit of quick research and come up with an idea, but they could also be entirely wrong compared to the business objectives. Or the task could relate solely to internal business processes, in which case there is no consensus it's whatever the internal culture of the business does.
"Millions of users expect this to be X so we should build X"
"Okay makes sense"
I'm still not convinced that you'd need anything else besides a general passion for building useful things.
I think at the end of the day, an employee with passion is always better than one without, if everything else is held even. I think this is a tough pill for a lot of people who arent/dont want to be passionate about their work to swallow. It impacts every attribute an employer cares about.
But it works great (it is such a successful game that it spawned a new genre) because both are really good at what they do!
But I would hope that I'm humble enough to admit (at least to myself) when I don't know much about a particular topic, and would accept at face value, without argument, when someone says to me, "thanks for trying to find an improvement here, but this is just how this data is displayed, and millions of fans expect to be able to read it this way, and will get confused if we do something different".
most people working in any particular industry understand that there is a particular way things are done for customers in that industry.
on edit: actually thinking about this I recall I was working on a live streaming sports station and I should display some scores (not baseball) I hate watching sports and yet I still chased down several people to find out if there was a well known way that scores should be sorted and displayed because I expected different sports might have different idiosyncrasies and I should provide a generic templating system for displaying the score (these folks evidently didn't care as much as ESPN because there was nothing special I should do)