I won't comment on the rest of the blog post, but I can fully relate to this point:
> Despite using golang, working with the absolute impenetrable monster that is kubernetes, taking on a helpdesk like on-call experience for one week at a time tending to configuration files over code, and not touching C++ at all, I feel more rewarded in my work than I ever did writing any amount of C++ in my entire life.
I actually experienced the same in the last couple of years. Doing ops work, and sometimes really tiny code changes which still help to improve a product and get recognized by people can feel really rewarding. Standardization work or any kind programming language / library development sometimes not that much (and that is independent of C++).
I think the reason for this is that in ops/support/etc environment one is working towards a known goal, which is well understood by people (peers, customers). If the goal has been reached everyone is happy, and one will likely get positive feedback. And even on the road towards the goal people will understand why it's important to get something done and help to get to the goal. E.g. code changes might not have to be perfect in order to get merged, and there might not be an extreme amount of bikeshedding.
Working on fundamentals can be different: In a setting like a standard library working group often a variety of people come together which do not share the same goal, and where goals are also not necessarily "customer driven". Instead of that, people more often have their personal goals they want to achieve, and they have their own set of motivations for it. This makes it harder to get buy-in from others. Goals are also not that quantifieable (like "fix a crash" or "improve latency by 10ms"), which makes it additionally harder to argument why something is important or less important.