A good sysadmin would not look like they are doing much work (everything is humming along and can self-heal minus physical problems), but a good devops person is constantly busy.
They're being perverted into a role having a full load of pure operations with shit for processes (and, often, systems) and an expectation that you have time to automate and shore up all the shit and technical debt accumulated since.
Can most good or even extraordinary developers simultaneously be elbow deep on a dozen unrelated products and actually get reasonable traction? I can barely keep one glass castle together, myself.
Never having the time to properly finish a project that I was proud of delivering, turning those into services so we could leverage self-servicing was a dream that most of the time never happened, we were left with half-done systems requiring tons of manual intervention (lots of toil) while having to move fast to the next thing...
Whats a “devops person” for you and what keeps them busy? And why cant they have systems that hum along self-healingly automated?
So, not only is there the responsibility of creating this self-healing automated infrastructure, but keeping tools and resume up-to-date, as well.