Maybe here they don't, but I think generally people see things your way.
I don't, and I didn't, even before I got into 'tech' and started reading HN. For me, the statement 'life outside of work is more meaningful than work' just doesn't make sense.
While I do treat 'work time' slightly differently than 'free time', the difference is not so great for me. It's mostly to keep some ritual and prevent weeks turning into long blurs.
In fact, I've never really treated 'work' as something so discrete. In high school, as soon as I figured out the 'tricks' to not getting kicked out of school and not failing classes, I spent most of my time doing what I wanted. I could skip many classes and engage in the few that interested me. And I had loads of time and energy left to learn stuff that I wanted to learn. Often I could make a deal with teachers to not go to class because when I was present, I was active and engaged, and I treated them like, well, just people, not bosses.
In university, there were less hoops to jump through, and there was more freedom, but once again I skipped classes I didn't care for (while making sure that I'd still have a decent grade and participate in group work), and actively engaged in the fun classes. Despite my absence, my targeted interested usually meant that I was one of people that the professors 'knew', rather than just a a face in the crowd.
And now, as a freelancer, I do make a point to set aside blocks of time for work, but for the most part I primarily try to make sure that I enjoy whatever I'm doing. Every once in a while a project feels like a chore, but for the most part I can choose the projects or the parts of projects that I enjoy or that I learn from.
Most of the time 'work' doesn't feel different from 'life outside work'. I love talking about my work and I'm baffled by my friends who make a point of actively avoiding the topic on a Friday pub night. I occasionally work in the weekend, but it doesn't feel like I'm 'losing' any of my weekend because of this. I occasionally take on projects that pay shit but are fun or helpful, and 'subsidise' this with bigger, often less fun projects.
Meanwhile throughout high school and college I saw classmates go to every class no matter the value, diligently do all the exercises 'just because', and complain about how it all sucked. Working as a contractor, I see colleagues drag themselves into work on Monday after a rough weekend of 'outside work life', and joke on a Wednesday about how it's almost Friday. And complain about how much work sucks.
I do get that not everyone has the freedom to find work that they enjoy, but what I don't get is that so many people do have that freedom, and quite a good safety net (especially here in Europe), but don't exercise it.
The happiest people I've known were generally the ones that didn't make a strict separation between work and 'life', but instead found work that didn't feel like work most of the time. It took a lot of creativity, effort and uncertainty to get there, but the results were worth it.
EDIT: I do realize that OP acknowledges this, so perhaps this should not have been a reply. apologies.