"But you don’t have to love it. You just need the intrinsic motivation to keep going."

If you want to be that expert developer that people go to for help, you really do need to love it. There's only so much that intrinsic motivation can do before you need the motivation to literally be "the pure love of coding".

Any expert programmer you find on StackOverflow, the ones who have answered heaps of questions and have heaps of rep, are the ones who love it. It's obvious when you read the articles they have written for fun in their spare time, and the answers they write on StackOverflow.

People whose intrinsic motivation is that it's fairly easy, they like it a little bit and pays well, for example, aren't going to do more than what it takes to not get fired, but if you love coding, you'll go above and beyond.