That's just a misunderstanding. There is a lot of fun to be had in maintaining others' code and there's nothing like finding a stupid bug (and fixing it) to boost your self-esteem as a programmer.

But maintaining code (especially shitty code) gets you much fewer rewards and recognition than writing new code from scratch (including shitty code) -so that may be a better explanation of why most people don't like being "maintainers".