Obviously it means setting up & maintaining application-ecosystem infrastructure:
Servers/Containers/VMs, CICD, monitoring, logging, integration/production testing, permissions, and various automated jobs/workflows <-- that sort of stuff. So that developers can just focus on programming.
Note that this description is entirely antithetical to your description "So that developers can just focus on programming".
You're not entirely wrong; this term has certainly degraded to the point of meaningless, where many companies now have teams that they call "DevOps teams", despite the fact that those teams only do Ops work. It's like we've come a full circle back to where different people do Dev and Ops work, but for some reason we call it with a term that means the literal opposite of that.
"Devops" means the latter at some companies, so it makes a kind of sense that those people don't do any dev work themselves.
But I agree with you, that's the exact opposite of the meaning "devops" has in other places, which is the meaning it was coined with.
That was the innovative approach of merging dev and ops teams to be the same people, and things like production CD, to explicitly prevent developers from just focusing on programming (which was considered detrimental when there's an outside world depending on it).
Like Agile and XP, it was a fresh new approach...
Attaching a time horizon on things which evolve causes many things to lose meaningful perspective relative to the discussion at hand.
The fact that things evolve does not negate my opinion that DevOps is a meaningful term.
Heck, I am currently watching the "That DevOps Guy" youtube channel (~50k subscribers) in order to learn about Helm Charts (related to kubernetes).
Clearly, people use the term DevOps to meaningfully communicate today. 10 years ago? This is a post from 2022, not 2012. So, you're referring to a discussion from 10 years ago... Yeah I don't know that its very relevant in a discussion of "DevOps actually does mean something [implied in today's age]"
a little over a hundred years ago a barber was a surgeon ("Up until the 19th century barbers were generally referred to as barber-surgeons, and they were called upon to perform a wide variety of tasks. They treated and extracted teeth, branded slaves, created ritual tattoos or scars, cut out gallstones and hangnails, set fractures, gave enemas, and lanced abscesses." [1] )
and a farmer was a soldier (WW1, US Civil War, & previously)
[1] https://brainblogger.com/2011/05/06/from-haircuts-to-hangnai...