That's my reaction too. I cannot imagine, unless we experience some world-wide cataclysm, moving away from observability, ci/cd, configuration management etc. and going back to bespoke bashscripts, hosts-as-pets, builds needing whole teams to put together, and whole teams to push out to servers.

I experienced a reversal like that once, going from a company with a very healthy SRE culture + technical setup, to a startup very much without it, and I couldn't believe we were wasting our time on manually doing things and putting out the same fires.

(I and a bunch of other SREs were hired by the CTO to fix this. He left 3 months later and my group was folded into OPs. Each one of us quit within a few months of that)