Yes, this is really the issue isn't it? Most problems have been solved and made into a library. The public internet is coming on its 30th year. Mobile apps are coming to their 15th year. Nothing really on the horizon. Most of what's left is the same drudge work over and over again. Drudge work is fun the first time you do it, but gets boring fast. It's like any artist forced to paint walls for a living. You'll have to excuse them if they aren't overly excited about their 30th year of wall painting.
So, how do you improve?
1. Try to make your wall painting more interesting. Carve out interesting stuff from time to time, even if it's a POC that will probably never get released. This is where you have to be creative/good as a manager and not just a whip cracker. What are different people interested in? Some like automation engines, some like ML, some like experimenting with new frameworks and languages. Experimentation like this used to be pretty common.
2. Give people some real vacation. Developers tend to be on call 24/7. Take it easy with the whip every once in a while. A good month would really relieve the burnout, but to most US companies/managers, this is akin to poison.
Both of us know this probably isn't going to happen, so be comfortable in the bed we've made for ourselves.
That's a false dichotomy[1]
[1] If I am reading you correctly, you're saying that there's two extremes
1. Programmers who enjoy it.
2. Programmers who hate doing anything that resembles work.
But, honestly, those two classes can't be the extreme ends of the spectrum. "People who enjoy programming" overlap significantly with "people who hate doing the work assigned to them".
You make it sound like people who hate doing the work you assigned to them must be people who hate programming.
IME, it's almost the opposite - people who love programming aren't going to be the least bit excited about mindless CRUD duties on an over-engineered stack that has 27 levels of indirection before it even hits the database record.
> Yet they’re out there, in surprisingly large numbers.
It appears that way to you because you are drawing wrong conclusions from your observations. You're looking at devs who hate working on your stack, for your team and extrapolating that to "These devs hate working as a programmer".
IOW, your observations that people hate working is accurate, your conclusion that it must be because they hate programming is not.