As a bit of an extremely refactorer myself, there are some of us who like adding features, but others who just like "kneading" the code.
Reading code is fun and it's a skill that took me time to develop. People need to told that's a skill you need and yes (shock) not emphasize creativity as much as we do. Creativity is great but it has enough encouragement in society already. We need people willing to read what already exists as well.
If you do a from-scratch rewrite, you could stay in igorance and might make those mistakes. But if you do a refactor, especially one broken up into many steps like this Linux one, it in fact demonstrates a better understanding the existing code and any nuance than merely leaving it in place!
Not touching scary-looking code is just bad, and not a wise form of humility.
That or they advocate doing a from-scratch rewrite.
But I think throwing away the changes should be an option if there's no objective improvement. Very often those changes end up on the main branch but they only cause changes, not improvements.
The real outcome is in someone's head.
I seem to get satisfaction from things that a lot of others might find tedious/boring.
People like us though just need to watch ourselves that what we’re doing is actually useful opposed to just scratching an itch. Which of course is not exclusive to us as developers often find many other ways of scratching itches without actually adding value.
On my best projects, I've done the first 90% so that a great many other can collective do the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th 90%s :). Without being "goal oriented" you can feel good about unlocking that part that would be too annoying for others, and they in turn can do the finishing work that wouldn't be fun for you.
Don't feel like you're not doing important work just because others are slotting in the keystones.