As long as it not the only reason I think its fine. Depends on the person though, since some people take failure way harder than others.
But its generally easy to make stuff a lot of players will like, just pick a song they like and make it playable - my second ever STD map has 5.2k plays sitting in grave just because its a popular song (most of those within 2 months of uploading), and I don't think its a stretch to call that map terrible. So if you want to rank a map to get your maps to more people you'll want to find a reason to want to make maps that mappers would like that wont leave you increasingly frustrated every time you have a set a bunch of people said they liked and find out modders and/or BN's don't like it and it'll die in graveyard.
Successful entertainment workers generally also have personal reasons for doing what they do other than than just to entertain people too. I mean just think of the amount of practice that goes into singing just for it to be good enough for people to enjoy it, would get quite frustrating if that was their only goal.
People are only warning you that it could be frustrating if that's your only reason for mapping, but if you don't care about ranking sets you can map songs for people to enjoy playing and there's nothing wrong with that if you can accept that most sets wont get many plays or favorites.