I think most programmers nowadays face no interesting problems to solve. They crave for a mental challenge, but instead of looking for a job that requires solving hard engineering problems, they believe they can satisfy their mental needs with coding in “somewhat” hard language.
I think you make a valid point in general about coding professionally at most jobs, and I know I've fallen into this desire myself while working on endless CRUD apps over the years. That said, I do think the article brings up some good points about domain modeling. After becoming somewhat proficient in Scala I've found these same features (ADTs) mentioned in the article helpful for the important part of these boring CRUD apps: modeling data at the various application boundaries (API, domain layer, database layer, etc). I now find using weaker type systems and/or imperative code to be either more error prone or more verbose (due to validation + extra tests).
Of course there are other parts of Scala, Haskell and similar that require more mental gymnastics than I'd like, such as composing asynchronous operations; flatMap and monad transformers may be "elegant" once you really understand them but damn is async/await easier to just write and move on with your life.
As a front-end developer whose job is is to write configurations(so not even actual code) for a form library I picked up Rust for this specific reason. Could've been any other language, but this one scratches my personal itch.
