I have also seen this from time to time. We have a few engineers in my org and another on my wife's team at another company that have interests similar to yours.
I think people with your interests are really valuable. We've changed around what we index on for performance evals/promotions and what work we assign them so that we can better accommodate these sorts of work preferences and skills. If someone is happier working on an essential but unsexy, unloved corner of your systems or infrastructure, and they're also many times more productive in that area than other engineers who have no interest in it, then you might as well take advantage of it!
The key factor is making sure that the work those people are doing is truly high impact (for example, CI improvement might reduce deployment failures, improve team deployment velocity) and not simply maintenance for sake of abstract cleanliness.
> We've changed around what we index on for performance evals/promotions and what work we assign them so that we can better accommodate these sorts of work preferences and skills.
It's really cool that you've that. And I'm glad to see I'm not alone in this.
It's the most beautiful thing I've seen. It has restored my faith in this country.
Let's keep this party going!”