Let me walk back that a bit - there's an exception. A good programmer can have boring work if their managers forbid them from building the tools necessary to reasonably do their job. I had a job once that did exactly that; they were happier with the status quo because with the setup they had they needed N hours of programmer time for every customer-feature launch pair. When I showed them how we could reduce it to approximately N hours of work to add the feature to every customer's instance, I was told no, because as it those N hours spent on each client's site were billable hours to the client. In other words, that I was reducing the total work needed by a factor of the number of customers to provide the same value was seen as detrimental to the business.

Their business model was broken to the point where it favored operational work over engineering work. Hours spent working were more important than results delivered. I was only at that job for a couple of weeks; pretty much exactly when they told me that they didn't want me to reduce my total workload because of their billing structure was when I decided that I'd be leaving. And I have zero regrets.

So, allow me to rephrase: I don't understand how good programmers, given the autonomy they ought to have, can have boring work.