You say this like there's nobody out there working on transistors or C or Emacs or Sqlite. There definitely are.

I've worked in C, used Emacs for almost two decades now, and work(ed) on plenty of SQL. We're tired, older. You either were part of the cohort who rode the wave of 150K starting salaries out of college or a bootcamp 15-20 years ago or not. And if you were, you now have graduated to making upwards of that and displacing locals out of their small rural communities because the economy is bad there and you can. Or you weren't part of that cohort and your work and hobby, which was never making tons of money, is now less likely than ever to make money and you're being displaced the former group pretending like programming is gauche.

Looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/show right now, it's not too bad. The #1 (Guitoro, a virtual guitar you strum with your keyboard) is definitely creative. The next 3 (budgeting, AI monitor, scraper) are boring, the next (How Random Are You?) is so-so...and the pattern continues like this.

The pessimist says creative projects are rare nowadays, an optimist says they're still coming out. You may also dislike the vibe-coded "...Craft" projects, but seemingly building a production-capable software in days is something that has never been done before and IMO inspiring.