Interesting question OP. No, I don't think you are the only one to ask that question - not by a long shot.
I have been coding professionally for over a decade now and I've done a lot of different types of programming. I've worked in product shops where they develop a product to sell or lease, I've worked in IT consulting companies that sell their services, and I've even started my own video game business. Didn't get very far with that last one but it was by far the most interesting and enjoyable programming I've ever done.
I've worked in VB6, Classic ASP, ASP.Net, C++, C#, Java, various flavours of SQL, Javascript, typescript, even a bit of Ruby.
Some jobs were really good, some really bad. I enjoyed the consulting jobs less than the product shop ones. And I enjoy front end of any kind a lot less than I enjoy backend and database stuff. During the bad jobs, I questioned whether software development was really the career for me. But switching jobs made me realize it wasn't software development as a whole, it was those specific jobs.
You mentioned creativity - I wrote a game (or part of one) in C++, using the Ogre rendering engine, bullet physics, and some other sound library. I cashed in my pension (what I had saved up until then) and used it to support myself for 8 months. That was some of the most enjoyable programming I have ever done. I solved some really, really interesting problems. I implemented a random map generation system that built an entire 3D mesh for a stage, I wrote pixel shaders, etc etc. It was awesome.
It was also the wrong way to go about game development but that is a story for a different day.
Does that mean you should go and work for a game development company? No, I'd say the possibility exists for those jobs to become soul crushing too. Just depends on what you do at the game company - not everyone gets to be the engine programmer.
Right now I want to move from regular software development into more data science/machine learning. I am studying both at the moment, and will hopefully be making an internal move later this year. Getting into that sort of environment will get me solving interesting problems again and not working on frontends, which I hate.