Yeah, passion is overused recruiter-speak. Sure it's nice for cheerleading if everyone feels passionate about their job, but it's really just short-hand for being engaged and focused which is orthogonal to passion.

There is however something which I believe software engineers need: an innate desire to understand how things work, and a tenacity to debug them when they don't. If you don't have this internal drive, then you'll never get over the hump of the vast background knowledge you need to be a productive programmer in any interesting job.