> Does any other programmer feel the same

Of course.

> and do you know why?

Because games are fun, and programming is fun, and programming something that will be fun for other people is fun.

But the games industry is crowded, and highly profit-optimized, and you just instinctively know that getting a tour of the budget sausage factory wouldn't bring a true sausage lover any significant pleasure.

I think I can sum it up in a Yogi-Berra-ism: The game industry is very industrialized. If you work on a commercial product, most of your effort goes towards making a product, and any specific details of the game are often a small part, one in a series of checklist features. And it's easy to dismiss assets when working on a little graphics demo, but the assets often take as much or more design insight than the code(which for most gameplay behaviors tends to boil down to finite state logic, timers, and lookup tables). What you most often get paid for as an industry employee is to churn out assets and simple behavioral scripts in quantity, so even though there are interesting problems at the top end of the field, you are probably not working on them for most production cycles, or only working on them for a short period.

As such, it's easy to tinker on a game and hyperfocus on a small aspect, but a different story to finish one in the way that most commercial games feel finished, both as software and in terms of filling in the blanks.

Just because you like painting doesn’t mean you’re interested in the art industry, or making a career out of it...

Gamedev pools together a large collection of backgrounds that makes development appealing to.. a lot of hobbies. And its also one of those subjects (some) users invest a lot of time into, both in playing and discussing, so its easy to feel you have the general knowledge of the outcome that its viable to create a “good” game; and particularly for programming, it crosses through a lot of domains — you can find reason to implement compilers, ML, graphics, a huge array of data structures, dynamic programming, any language paradigm (and any language), a full set of “patterns”, etc.

Tbh its harder to find reasons why a programmer-hobbyist wouldnt find something interesting in game development.

Its really easy to find reason you wouldn’t want to be in the industry (its an absolutely pathetic state of affairs)