in their minds perpetual reliance on creativity is bad engineering

That would be because it is. Using new code to solve a known problem is little more than an investment in creating defects. Sometimes you have to do it for reasons outside of the context of it being new, and every software engineer should know how to implement the core functionality related to their area of expertise in order to understand why it might not work, but writing new production code for the sake of new code is irresponsible. If you want to write fun, creative code, just don’t put it in something that is actually intended to work.

That said, many developers do celebrate the creativity of putting the pieces together to do something substantively new. It’s a rush. It leads to a bit of a god complex, and too many software engineers refuse to be responsible for managing their own brainworms, but it is a common motivator of SWEs.