Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

Well, he is using code as a tool, as a mean to reach his goals. I believe this is the best way to write code, after all. Should almost be the only sensible way. It's just that in 2024, having a programming job is 90% of times doing things you don't care with tools you don't want to use. The problem is not programming itself.

You forgot to mention terrible managers, abusive “business” people, and utterly broken processes that put all of the responsibility and none of the agency on the developers themselves.