It's not unheard of, although a bit unusual for web developers. Of the three you hired, it's arguable that only the React developer "should" know how to deploy a web app. A Python developer can happily avoid web development with no material impact to their employability.
I didn't know the end-to-end process of deploying a dynamic web application[^1] until somewhat recently (5+ years into a software career). For much of my career a different team handled the site deployment, which only ran on the company intranet[^2].
That said, I only learned the FULL end-to-end process in the last few months, when I finally began building my own web application, entirely on my own, from the ground up.
The process wasn't hard to learn. The basic fundamentals have not changed, it's just there is a lot more noise and abstractions. AWS, GCP, Vercel, DigitalOcean, whatever - the myriad of services they offer are all examples of that noise.
Don't get me wrong, cloud providers solve real business problems and make developers lives easier in a lot of ways. But they are not in the business of making it easy for you to roll your own web application without them. They still want your money and that sweet, sweet vendor-lock.
Anyway, I kinda like DigitalOcean because the abstraction layer is relatively transparent and their documentation is very, very good. They also have a limited set of features, which sounds like a con but is in fact a pro. Fewer features = less "noise". For a simple web app, one may only need 3-5 of AWS's hundreds of services.
If your web-dev company is very small, you don't need a dedicated DevOps expert[^3]. It's easy enough for a decent software engineer to learn. It sounds like you just hired three of them.
[^1]: I knew how to deploy sites with HTML, CSS, and Javascript only.
[^2]: Should I have learned how to deploy dynamic apps to the world wide web sooner? Sure, but there were a lot of things to learn early in my career.
[^3]: This is assuming a standard web-dev shop, making a web service running online.