SRE was born of putting software engineers to work building operational software and automation tailored to an organization and application. In contrast, no matter what anyone says, DevOps was objectively born of replacing the operations discipline and career track with a poorly-understood tool economy and ongoing opex to a cloud provider. As you say, typical JavaScript engineers can’t be bothered to understand network capacity planning yet feel they are more qualified to take their application to production by deferring all decisions to cloud providers. Who all employ SREs/PEs, not DevOps Engineers, by the way, and there is a big distinction.
We have people who can handle the operational stuff. They’re called systems administrators, network engineers, yes, even SREs, and other folks who are really good at understanding how computers and the Internet actually work, and a webdev bootcamp gives zero context into exactly what they do. None. Then, your ten-head startup suddenly scales to needing a physical footprint because it will literally save 80% of opex, and all your DevOps Engineers say “but why? There’s AWS,” and you’re in Medium hell for weeks arguing about it.
Apropos, if I interview you and find you have written a thoughtpiece on Medium about how “sysadmin is evolving” and it’s “time for the gray beards to learn code,” you do not get a call back. That has actually happened, and no, sysadmin is not evolving. I know staff-level “full stack engineers” who can’t tell me what an ASN is. The motions in the industry have merely made those people more in demand at a few companies and served to cement their position as “where computing gets done”.
Expect serious, existential operational threats and breaches to rise dramatically as DevOps continues to “win,” and consider it a smart strategic move to avoid DevOps culture in the long term. If you write a req called “DevOps Engineer,” I don’t even know what to say to you.