Not sure why you seem to think code written with feeling behind it is some unmaintainable mess. That's been the opposite of my experience.

The way people fail in this line of work, if they have skill, is burnout. Burnout is the thing that'll get you. So you do whatever you can to stave it off - and that requires working on something you actually care about in some way.

We aren't talking about "code with feeling behind it" but rather "code as some kind of art".

You might have a different idea of what art looks like. Well designed abstractions are elegant, conceptually simple, and not-leaky. These tend to make code more maintainable and easier to comprehend.

One of the things you learn after writing code long enough, is that there is no such thing as a perfect abstraction, or even a non-leaky one. Eventually you run into edge cases, either in performance or functionality, that causes you to add warts to your abstraction.

Stipulating that no abstractions are perfect shouldn't be an excuse to abandon the entire notion. There's still a gradient of more or less elegant and flexible abstractions.

This definition of art, though not wrong, is so expansive as to be meaningless, especially in the context of this discussion.