As others have discussed, people argue for many reasons, ego being one of them.

I didn't really understand this. I grew up before the internet, and I have ADHD, which essentially means I have limited working memory.

One of my compensatory strategies for this is to have a fairly comprehensive world model at the ready in long-term memory.

If you told me something that contradicts my mental model, I might argue, in order to figure out whether I need to update my model or not.

The argument between someone ego-driven operating on a motte-and-bailey basis, and someone who just truly wants to understand, but won't let it go because they feel they need to understand, gets ugly quickly.

Fortunately, I'm older, my model doesn't need to change as often, I'm better at discriminating about things I care about or that are irrelevant, and, of course, I can always disengage with "that's interesting; I'll have to research it" and go down a rabbit hole on the internet if what they are saying doesn't seem to make a lick of sense.

I will say that the need to be right -- not the need to lord it over others, or the need to prove I'm right -- has probably helped my programming career immensely.

The burning desire to be right can be completely orthogonal to giving a shit about whether others think you're right or not, or giving a shit about others when they're wrong and it doesn't adversely affect you.