>I would say yes, in large part. The solution is simple but not easy. The key is “Motivation follows action”.Maybe I've always misunderstood that common saying but there are so many counterexamples that it doesn't seem to be true.
E.g. I actually know how to cook and have already taken the "action" of home cooking many hundreds of times such as preparing spaghetti and baking cakes without any premade kits and yet -- I'm still not interested in cooking at all.
At the same time, I can appreciate that others like chefs or hobbyists take a deep interest in cooking and take delight in combining brand new ingredients. However, even when I give a cookbook as a gift and let that book pass through my hands, it doesn't trigger any interest in cooking.
Maybe another more widespread example is photography. Most people have cameras on smartphones now but most take photos as a utility function rather than some artistic photography interest. The act of taking photos doesn't really get most people over that threshold of being "interested in photography". E.g. they take a picture of where their car is parked in the airport as a reminder -- and then go on to think about everything else that's more interesting to them than photography.
Likewise, making people do more math will make many (most?) become less interested in math. I think that's what some people mean by "generating internal interest is unsolvable".
Where "Motivation Follows Action" makes much more sense is the limited scenario of already being interested in a particular domain but you're just temporarily stuck. E.g. a book author has written texts before but is now staring at a blank page. (Writer's Block.) So the idea is start writing anything -- even nonsense -- and then let the momentum of laying words down start feeding itself and then eventually you end up with a finished book.