It's not complicated per se, but the industry makes it complicated. Running a basic web app isn't complicated if you throw up a server, but if you use Kubernetes then you've suddenly made things much harder.

Things are only as hard as we make them.

Computers are hard to manage as easily as our codebases for a lot of reasons. But it should also be known that the field is fairly young and there's a lot of competing ideas while we're trying to keep the lights on with software from several decades ago that keep paying the bills. This is not a challenge that we incentivize our best engineers to tackle necessarily because our industry currently values pumping out more features than actually streamlining existing features. It's also not clear whether some of these problems can be solved with "better" engineering rather than a completely new way of approaching software systems. From a project / engineer alignment perspective, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JNXx8VdbAE

I wouldn't call it just DevOps. It's computers. We can all do what we do, we can write our `print "Hello World"` because we leverage millions upon millions of lines of code that other people have written to abstract away the other complications to getting code shipped.

It's both amazing and terrifying to think about.