I feel like it's entirely dependent on the environment people are working in. I've been in places that makes me feel empathy for both the articles author and the one you responded too. Constant grinds and battles for small gains, where it does feel toxic. However, I've also worked in places similar to what you described. It turns out, the place you work with and the people you work with are a whole lot more important then what you're working in.

It's my personal state in a company setting, I'm simply in pain, I can't think straight, I struggle with mundane things, I lost taste and desire to craft nice solutions.

Made me question my skills for a bit, until I realized that when outside my job, I enjoy reading/thinking about what I'd consider non trivial topics (parsing techniques, state machine minimizations, ...) and in these moments, it's nothing but joy, even when it's hard it's a positive feeling. And it yields long term enlightenment.

There's no such thing when you finally found why lib-a doesn't work well with lib-b anymore, or if lib-c will be compatible with the previous ones.

Now you mention 'solving interesting puzzles with peers' maybe my puzzles are not interesting and i can't rely on my peers to find interesting ideas :)

Also there were topics on how companies mis-apply agile development, which end up in this never-ending bug chase and cramming half features in an application. But based on conversations around me, it seems that a lot of people live in this average.