I understand that you don't want to talk to random people on the street, but I disagree strongly with "just doing your job" mentality. If you have any sort of creative output job where you work within a team (engineering, academia, some artistic endeavors), things are different.

Companies often pay for their employees to attend professional and technical development workshops or go to conferences, because part of your job is to improve your skills. Casual water cooler talks do the same thing; they improve your skills, and help initiate creative ideas that ultimately help build better things.

In my own PhD, I saw supervisors demand their students attend department get together, bar hangouts at conferences, and even casually talk to other people in the dept. If I was a manager of creative types, I would absolutely rate someone who didn't "waste their time" at work lower, because if your job description is to create, you need to do reasonable things to improve your creative skills and outputs.

As with all things, there's a time, place, and situation where it can be more suitable or less suitable.

Several of my employers issue staff with noise cancelling headphones on day one on the job. The employee is supposed to make the suitable judgement call on when they're suitable (needing a few hours of uninterrupted concentration) and when they're not.

The alternative is giving people offices so they can actually isolate, or understanding that people who operate on 'maker time' will not be productive with regular interruptions.

I think we are in complete agreement. Creative employees must have the right to direct their own work day (especially their uninterrupted deep work hours), and the responsibility that they fulfill all their formal and informal job requirements. One aspect of the latter is casually exchanging ideas with coworkers they don't usually work with.

People don't always have to be improving themselves at work. At a certain level of skill (say average), just doing your job is enough. Now sure, if you want to get ahead at work, then it's a good idea to go the extra mile, but not everyone cares about that or needs to care about that. They have other aspects of their life that they want to focus on at the expense of their work life.