It also really depends on what you find cool, there are different ways to look at things. For example if I think of pipelines as these execution graphs that run on their own and make sure your artifacts end up in the right place, then its really fun. CI systems that visualize this make it even more interesting.
A little combination of the right personal interests and perspective goes a long way towards building up resilience to deal with the ugly bits.
I had this interesting experience back in university. We were doing some simple web service project in pairs, and it consisted of a program and some devops stuff. My partner in that project turned out to have skills that exactly complemented my own - he had trouble with the algorithmic stuff that I thought was trivial, yet he easily stitched all the services together by editing some configuration files before I even understood what any of them were for.
A little combination of the right personal interests and perspective goes a long way towards building up resilience to deal with the ugly bits.