I think the parent's point (though I could be reading my own thoughts into it), is that the things you mention only matter to the user if it directly affects them. An end user couldn't care less what the maintenance costs are if they aren't passed on to them in some way. If they are, then its completely in the interests of the company to have easy to maintain software. Or if changes are time-sensitive and the company is unable to keep up which change requests. If all that's invisible to "users" (or internal stakeholders), it really doesn't matter how much the boots on the ground hate the software.
But I think also the "code doesn't matter" really means, that ideally there is no (new) code, because there is in fact an existing solution but the person asking for the solution doesn't know it. This is likely more the case with internal stakeholders that ask for something to be built that does X, not realizing that there is readily available software or libraries that does X (or something close to it). So part of our role is to know the landscape of what part of the domain really needs new (potentially bug-ridden code) to be written.
> People working remotely may have health or social issues on a greater average.
I don't know any reason that working remotely would correlate to health/social issues. Is this a known statistic from somewhere? The social thing perhaps correlates to working (remotely or not) in a software field, but I'm not sure why remote workers would be statistically any different than non-remote workers. (I happen to be a remote worker)
Oh I don't find sports interesting at all either, though I would argue that people do in fact try those sorts of competitions in coding. My beef with parent is the notion that this stuff is objectively pointless somehow just because _we_ don't find it interesting.
Who cares what some author or poet decided to write? Who cares what some scientist found? Who cares what food tastes like? Who cares what article someone posted on Hacker News? Who cares about the bug you fixed? Who cares what software exists?
But I think also the "code doesn't matter" really means, that ideally there is no (new) code, because there is in fact an existing solution but the person asking for the solution doesn't know it. This is likely more the case with internal stakeholders that ask for something to be built that does X, not realizing that there is readily available software or libraries that does X (or something close to it). So part of our role is to know the landscape of what part of the domain really needs new (potentially bug-ridden code) to be written.