No, it does not - as evidenced by most of the industry. Being deeply interested actually hinders your ability to work in a lot of typical programming jobs, because it'll make you get bored out by the realities of business and pushing the same pointless CRUD or boilerplate JS code.

I feel that the reason startups like young people is that only fresh programmers can feel passionate about or impressed by this kind of work.

OK I see you are doing the HN thing and pedantically interpreting the words literally.

Programming well requires that you be interested in the topic. It is of course possible to program a computer without being very interested and many do.

Not trying to be pedantic here. You wrote, quote, "programming really requires that the programmer is deeply interested in doing it", and I disagree with that.

As for your clarification, it depends on how you understand the word "well". In general, mastering any skill requires interest in it, otherwise a person settles down on the minimum level that lets them do their job comfortably. But a point I think is important to highlight is that this minimum skill level is often "programming well" in the business context. No matter how many buzzwords companies put into their job offers, what most of the industry really wants is replaceable cogs that follow orders well and don't think too much. Being actually passionate about programming seems not only a bad proxy; having passion can be counterproductive at work.