The qualities in he work output is what I admire. I won't deny that if you were a musician at a company that creates elevator music, or a corporate writer compiling a quarterly report, that it could just be as bad as programming for hire.
In my very quickly written submission, I wasn't very clear what kind of musician or writer I meant, and I agree this may be an idealized projection.
But if you've ever read a novel that at the end you feel a bit lonely, like you've lost a friend, or been moved by a beautiful piece of music, then you'll perhaps see what I'm getting at.
Perhaps the artists that created these moving pieces of art had a difficult experience when creating the work. It's common to hear some writers say they hate the act of writing, for example.
But at the very least the end product has the ability to create joy in others.
As a maintenance programmer working on some horrible ball of mud codebase that all programmers fear to touch, I don't even have that chance.
All too often the code is both painful to work on and painful to consume as a user.