It's a lot of fun. I'm also an old timer.
I think it's also somewhat addictive. I wonder if that's part of what's at play here.
A coworker that never argues with you, is happy to do endless toil... sometimes messes up but sometimes blows your mind...
The promise/potential of ever-refining skills and agents drives this compulsion for me. "NEXT time it will be even better. And NOW it's set up to avoid the pitfalls I faced last time." You can feel the exponential engine-building.
I'm not a SWE. I'm a mechanical engineer who spends his life in excel. So when I first made my own node editor app and then asked Claude to read that for my workflow in my second project.... I felt like God herself.