I guess I have some of that in me. I have no shortage of things I'd do with a code base (test, fuzz, profile & improve performance, refactor, look for and fix bugs, audit for security issues, run various static & dynamic analyzers, and just generally try to improve architecture) to improve it. This kind of thing is a large part of what takes up time in my personal projects (and the very limited open source participation I've done). That's a ton of turd polishing but I think it pays in the end (and you see a lot of it going on if you follow projects with a reputation for good code, like OpenBSD or Linux).

I did this at work too early on in my career too but it was quickly made clear to me that if there's no ticket that the customer has opened (or at least approved), they're not paying for it and I can't spend time on it. Tickets I opened myself were 99% ignored or only brought up when a problem I had anticipated actually manifested in product (told ya.. now this 18-month-old ticket is suddenly relevant?). I quickly learned not to give a crap about the code base (hard to give a shit if you're not really allowed to give a shit?). I guess that also slashed my motivation (and productivity with it). It's pretty frustrating to work this way.

Creative freedom and autonomy are key. I'm sure there was no micromanager assigning Ingo Molnar the "make kernel builds faster (est. 80 hours of work)" ticket.