i've been on both sides of the fence and it's a case of 'grass is always greener on the other side'. the truth is, running any sort of non-trivial infra is ducking expensive.
Precisely zero have been put out of work.
Actually, seems like managing k8s is an order of time expenditure greater than managing an old-school F5 with a bunch of Unixy web servers behind it.
Managing a switch and servers is a piece of cake compared to managing k8s, IMO.
I come from this old world of managing switches and servers and today we definitely need a lot less people to run code in production. I used to work at a company with ~2000 machines in physical data centers before containerization, this required a huge infra team - I'm sure that today I could support the same workloads with half the team.
Devops gives the benefit of cows instead of pets, and a ton of reusable work. So I get why it's more 'valuable' from a remuneration basis.
or Nagios...