If you're referring to the days of when systems engineers would run named fleets, then yeah, those days were nightmarish but for different reasons. Instead of debugging the Linux networking stack, I had to defer everything out to a team that ran a help desk to try to find time to investigate because I was locked out of access and tooling. I don't miss those days one bit, though, it was fun to name components of my fleet.
A lot of companies moved to the cloud because their old data centers (or hosts) were driven by ticket systems instead of API's and access management. What took three weeks was now solved in seconds; the beginning was fascinating without a doubt. Then companies realized they owned none of this virtualized infrastructure and were at the behest of a very large corporation who could make sweeping changes with little to no notice. Although Kubernetes was pitched as providing extra grease to the gears of the enterprise, and they weren't wrong, that is not its total value to the enterprise.
The real value in Kubernetes running your own platform on someone elses hardware, especially to the degree where you can eventually free yourself from cloud provider lock-in that the above incurred. An example, if a company can spin up a team to create a database-as-a-service in Kubernetes clusters, then your RDS costs can shift dramatically down, and it develops a new level of capability and understanding that your company never had before.
I'm a SRE-SE, but I mostly use the title "Distributed Systems Software Engineer" because I feel that really fits what I do. DevOps is just a catch-all title for non-application-software tasks and roles at this point because it consumed so many things like "release manager", "QA", "application operations", etc... Personally, I do not trust companies or teams that use this as some sort of distinguishable title.
To answer the last part of your question, "Why are DevOps everywhere", because companies have diverse needs in terms of supporting software and software development, and DevOps is basically the catch all email of software engineering.