[thinkharderdev]

I agree. I think people on HN generally underestimate the extent to which developers themselves push to work on new features instead of maintenance. It's often a different kind of feature though. I can't count how many times in my career devs (including me!) instantly jumped to "we need to rewrite X using new framework Y" in response to technical debt in X.

[k__]

I only saw that behavior in younger devs.

The average dev just does their job. Same as with the average person in every industry.

Sure, it's nice to do a cool feature, but most people don't work at interesting projects to start with, and they simply have to churn on. There isn't much difference between a new feature or maintenance in boring projects.