I agree with everything you said.

I'd just like to add that the world is full of fascinating (yes, even tech/math/cs heavy) problems. If you find your problem (as distinct from the tech stack or whatever) boring, you could always find a different, cutting edge, problem to work on the next few years (or decades)

You might have to get a PhD/demonstrate extreme dev skills/build cutting edge software etc to get paid to work on such problems, but them's the breaks.

You don't have to 'settle' for boring domains/problems if you don't want to, but you do have to put yourself in a position to get paid to work on them, and some "soft skills" might come in handy (though I doubt the value of some books in that list. 'clean code'? bleh) .