This is one of those things that is easy to discuss in theory, but in practice it doesn't work that way, at least not in most cases. And in my experience working with COBOL at a bank: no, the employees weren't passionate about it. In fact, the only passionate employee was an old guru who wrote assembly code for the bank's mainframe.

You could take it to an extreme, and argue that working with malfunctioning computers, using only BASICA.COM for DOS, writing accounting software and getting paid mere cents for it, requires more passion -- after all, who would want to work like this if they didn't feel passionate about it -- but of course it isn't.

It's great to work in challenging or atypical projects, maybe with tools that are not the easiest or more ergonomical, but there's a baseline of comfort below which you're probably not passionate, just masochistic.