Oddly, I think both are true, at the same time.

I've worked with language zealots and it's awful. Especially the ones with the hardcore purely functional obsession. But that can apply to almost anything: folks that refuse to use anything but $TECH (K8S, FreeBSD, etc). Zealots like this general care less about delivering and more about what they get to play with.

Then you have the folks that care about delivering. They're not language agnostic, they have strong opinions. But also: they communicate and collaborate, they actually CARE: they have real empathy for their users and their co-workers, they're pragmatic. Some of these folks have a lot of experience in pushing hard to make things work, and they've learned some valuable lessons in what (not) to do again. Sometimes that can manifest as preferences for languages / frameworks / etc.

It's a messy industry, and it can be extremely hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. But a small team with a few of those can do truly game changing work. And there's many local optima to be had. Get a highly motivated and gelled team using any of: Elixr / Typescript / Zig / Rust / Ada / Ocaml / Scala / Python / etc, and you'll see magic. Yes, you don't need fancy tech to achieve that. There's more than a few of those writing C for example, but you're unlikely to see these folks writing COBOL.

I agree with you but also agree with the above, if youre stuck permanently in some tangled codebase with a boring language/style, the really good programmers tend to find something more fun to work on - unless they can bring their new skills/experience to bear. personally I'll only go back to doing boring stuff if i can't find a job doing the fun stuff

Yeah, this has been my experience too. The mentality seems similar to "productivity hackers" who spend more time figuring out the quickest, most optimal way to do a thing than people who just do the thing.

One of the things I've noticed is that people who just do the thing, take note of what's annoying, and fix the most annoying things about a process later on tend to make the most impressive dents in a system or process, especially since they spend time mulling over the idea in their head and so by the time they implement, they aren't "zero-shotting" a solution to what's generally a complex issue.

Just doing the the thing, oddly lets you sleep on it, and the brain often has the a more optimal way waiting in the morning.

hear! hear!