I've worked on 2 companies where I was in a team of 4/5 devs + 1 SRE in charge of the infra. In both cases, once the SRE guy created the appropriate terraform modules and CI template, he had to move on to a new team because there was literally no work left for him to do. Once things are infra as a code and the happy path is defined and implemented as a process, we rarely lost time thinking about infrastructure. Or anything.

The system needs permission for AWS S3? Here is the component. Does it need to setup secrets? Here is the component. Does it needs to be in the same VPC as a Redshift cluster, or whatnot? There's a component for that. Do you need a SQS/RDS/Redis service? You get it.

K8s, terraform and Atlantis have been such huge enablers I cannot overstate. Everything is so nimble and cheaply setup that our current infra bill is about 500USD/month to generate over 100k MRR for the company.

And better yet, we rarely ever think of our infra unless we want to do something brand new (such as testing Sagemaker), or there's unexpected traffic above our current scaling limits (about once a year). Plus, if we need to fix anything infra related there's an internal cookbook for that.

I also feel I have acquired useful skills by learning all of this.