My current theory is that feeling pain/annoyance is an integral part of the software engineering process.

Hear me out: when your architecture is starting to fail you, the cost of change goes up. That's painful for developers, who will hopefully be given the time to address this (or sneak these changes in alongside other work). Clankers don't care. Whether it's a couple of lines in a few files or a massive change across the entire codebase, it's all the same to them: tokens in, tokens out.