Turning a builder into a formidable founder, which via the PG quote is someone who seems they will always get what they want is in its self a death. A builder... a truth-seeking creator dies. Devoured by someone who gets what they want, a superego. There should be a black bar at the top.
You say you don't understand these types & that this is a high conflict subject for you. To offer a perspective, I think it has to do with how individuals cope with their existence. In every moment, we could be doing something more worthy of existence; worse, most of our life is sacrificed to working that definitely does not meet such lofty criteria. So take these small, but irrational acts just as minor self-therapy (vs rebellion) that is constructive to the individual -- hopefully it does not do any serious harm (I trust your judgement you made the right call).
I wager this is going to become more and more common as humanity cries against the hyper-specialization and hyper-inferred MEANING on work that may be trivial in scope when juxtaposed that we really only know that ourselves our conscious (or choose your word for whatever illusion we're experiencing). I imagine there exists at least 1 UBER phd gig worker who did not fully take seriously the annotative training work he or she was doing, if you're familiar with that article that made rounds recently.
People also change with age, and perhaps in 20 years you may find yourself doing these same things. Or, maybe now, coping differently in different ways, but that people find equally incomprehensible -- I know I do.
/s
Shout out to the risk takers.