I guess I haven't ascended. I've been a SW dev for many years (def >10, probably 15 at this point), I lead a team, and I still curse to myself while working in our codebase. I think it's because I spend like half my time in meetings so I take half the technical work my reports do, so it bothers me more when I finally try to get something done.

Occasionally I'll rage-refactor something and submit a massive PR that fixes a bunch of annoying stuff (currently sitting on ~1k changes stashed), but I only send those in just after a release (don't want to get yelled at for missing a deadline). Or we'll take too long to make a decision on new dependency, so I'll just build it in an afternoon (just did that last week; 300-400 LOC).

I'm no rockstar dev, but I can crank out the work when sufficiently pissed off. Otherwise, I just coast a bit like the rest of the team. So if my boss wants me to be productive, he just needs to delay until I get fed up and just do it.