You are confusing 3 completely different issues and not accounting the enjoyment of learning new things.

This is exactly what I believe passion is. Passion isn't something that's 'vague' or that you have to search for. It's the simple joy of doing some activity or learning something related to that activity. No joy, no passion.

If you're looking at it like that then you're not going to have any interest in programming after work. If you look at it like "I am a tradesman and I can either pay someone to do this for me or I can just take a few minute and hack together solutions for myself then I can save time and money".

I write a lot of software for my own tasks to automate things I need to do like recently I made a remote Steam Streaming machine so I can finally fully migrate to linux and to do so I needed to write a control service on my machine and write a daemond that listens for a packet to run a `shutdown /h` on the windows machine. It was a bit of programming but it wasn't "existential dread" and it definetly wasn't in some attempt to bettering myself as an employee. It was because I wanted a product that doesn't exist so I made it and I think more software developers should be interested in that. Not for work reasons but because making things is cool and we live in a time where people are happy to give you perfectly good hardware that they think is "garbage" because it's 1 version out of date. This is the perfect time for the engineer to live, and not just the Civil or Software but any engineer.