I mean, surely there are "oh crap" moments when something not foreseen needs to be addressed, but I don't assume each construction project is a product of spontaneous creativity and improvisation?
The fact that we often have to do semi-creative things is more a sign that our industry is immature and shitty, than that the work is inherently much more creative than construction work. We keep trying to make spherical houses even though it'd be a hell of a lot cheaper, faster, and in many ways better, to just make ordinary ones. Then we pat ourselves on the back when we "creatively" figure out how to fit parts and furniture designed for normal-ass buildings into the curved-walled rooms of our spherical ones. Meanwhile the customer just wanted a fucking house and didn't care what shape it was.
I met a team that had put months into building a simple job queue. They had a combination of a zookeeper and kafka cluster, an nginx instance, an API process to receive the inbound HTTP put/get, a database writer reading the kafka topic, a database, etc. It was crazy. The lead just had no idea how to build something simple.
I've seen tons of stuff like this. It is not unusual at all and really is about how immature the industry is.