My experience has been that caring about your craft is a great way to get in trouble. As a previous co-worker once told me "it turns out that the less I care about this job the more happy my managers are with my performance."
That's because time pressure is real. We can't all be Knuth and spend our life looking for the perfect algorithm to solve all problems we could ever have. Most of us must ship something that works well enough for a particular scenario, as soon as possible - tomorrow, next week, next month, not next year. If you care too much about the quality of your work, you might end up never shipping; at some point you have to stop caring and just push the damn button.
It's not always time pressure. It can also be, for example, calling out others for doing things that don't make sense or hinder what's actually needed for the job/company, which in turn makes them uncomfortable and leads to discipline for you and not them. My response after having that happen? Fine, I'll look the other way and not care how much we're getting done anymore.
There is an exact and correct amount to care. It varies job to job. It's mostly a matter of just turning the big dial inside yourself until you get it in the sweet spot for where you are now.
I have the same exact experience at my current company. My official performance, which is given by my boss, improved since I started to not care. My output fell, the quality of my work is the same, just less quantity, but for some reason my scores are higher.
On the other hand, I had a job where my performance was rewarded greatly, and I was lucky to be at the right place for that. Almost all of the employees at the same company were not that lucky.
