I think you can have a well tended garden without giving up creativity.

You're not sacrificing creativity by practicing structures, considerations, and methodologies that maintain or improve the developer experience with whatever creative endeavor you're on.

The structure of your garden doesn't prevent you from playing around with new plants, it just outlines a set of patterns and expectations known to drive better outcomes.

I'm not saying that your extension of the analogy is bad I'm just disagreeing with some of the premise.