I have seen organisation devolve like that on the database side. At one time you have a DBA team monitoring server, planning for capacity, upgrade, optimising script and owning datamodel. A few years of cost cutting and 3 guys own the datamodel of tens of application, over hundreds of servers, basically becoming a huge bottleneck for the 300+ developers. When adding a column is eating half of your project budgets and adding uncertainty on delivery date, developers become creative. The best of them sneak a way to get DBA access, the others multiplex value in existing columns (Hello, "PROPERTIES" xml column !)
In the early days of Unix, there weren't sysadmins really...just one or two devs on each team that dealt with it. They were later centralized, and...seen this cycle before.