Its a hard pill to swallow but I just want to point out that if you look around you at most jobs, including highly paid tech jobs - most people do not care about the job itself apart from the fact that it compensates them well - whether that be with salary or with time/benefits.

And not everyone simply has the choice to just find another job when they are unhappy. I know you caveated that with the "if you can" but I'd say the vast majority of people can't.

That and the fact that most peoples work is not actually theirs as you say. Everything you do is part of the company, and managers/execs take credit for the work all the time at many companies.