No, for a few reasons: 1) it's often tedious work 2) often the bug has been around a long time and nobody's really noticed or cared, so how important could it be? 3) organizations rarely reward this work.
While individual fixes are often unnoticed, the overall effect is profound. Users are happier, support staff are more confident, and programmers are able to build the next layer on a firm foundation.
I agree bug fixing my code is more enjoyable to bug fixing other people's code, and I agree that most programmers resist the former and hate the latter.
But for me, bug-fixing foreign code, is one of the truest tests of skill.
Personally I prefer the thinking, reasoning, tracking down, supposed 'tedium' that comes with bug fixing.
Sure, bugs are boring, but most of the time the new features aren't terribly exciting either.
And managers care about their career and the size of their team is a proxy for their degree of success. If a company has 100 developers to create new software and 10 to bug fix, they want to be in the development team. If it's 100 to bug fix and 10 to build, it's the other way around.
These engineers never really learn from their own mistakes or the mistakes of others. They just jump from one startup to another. "What we need here is another microservice!"
I don't think fixing bugs is the only satisfying thing. Sometimes, the need for new features arises only after users use your product for some time.
For example, PriceTable lets users generate professional-looking estimates quickly. After about a year of using our product, some customers said, "we use it everyday and have sent thousands of estimates to our clients. Is there a way to run reports to gain sales analytics insights?" So we added that feature too. And I found it satisfying. :)
I think I like bug fixing/performance fixing/'design' (as in db, infrastructure, code structure, refactoring - not UI) most. I don't mind new feature work, mainly because it typically involves some if the latter I suppose. I really don't like total greenfield work where you have to faff about with all the initial config of stuff (which assuming you don't start a new project every day you haven't done for ages) - especially anything to do with JS where you also have to work out how to do it without their 'helpful' cli tool, or how to combine a slightly different 19 tools & frameworks than the example you found.
Even when it’s time for your next job, you can’t very well put on your resume “I fixed bugs for a year” and expect to standout.
Then there is answering behavioral questions at the interview where you have to talk about accomplishments.
On the other hand, I can’t pretend to know what most developers on the enterprise dev side go through at interviews. Even though that’s where I worked most of my career until 2020, I targeted small companies who were looking for “adult supervision”.
Piling more chairs on top of each other to get features out the door can be demoralizing. You know it's going to collapse under its weight eventually, and you're just speeding the company along to The Big Expensive Rewrite.
But fixing bugs? An actual chance to make things better? That is satisfying.