(And I am what a current sysadmin would be if we did not call ourselves "devops engineers" now.)
You seem to be the sort of developer that developers love and the sort of sysadmin that gets fired in the first week Just my .02 after two and a half decades.
Not to say that you are entirely wrong or your approach doesn't have merit in the new world (especially SV). But it doesn't work for sysadmins and production environments anywhere but your bubble. Not yet.
Anyway, the core mission of anybody touching the stack is to enable the business to achieve its goals. Nothing, and I mean nothing, more. "Restricting that environment" is appropriate in some environments, and a number of my clients bring me in to help with that. Facilitating developer velocity--and, yes, developers do tend to like me, because I'm good at this while achieving goals around security and uptime--is appropriate in, probably, more. Pays better, too, even if it shouldn't.
1. Design. 2. Discipline.
Where these two values are dispensable long term devops and the new world shine through. I've worked in both worlds and the only mistake is assuming one size fits all.
There were guys like this that were there before and helped everyone along: https://www.computerhope.com/people/don_libes.htm
I'm still not certain what point you were trying to make with "neithere here nor there", however.
"All of which are clunky, opaque, and harder to work with than any other language I have used in the last decade."
Wrong question. A better one: Is it more clunky, opaque, and harder to work with than every other language that's appeared in the last decade? Because no one seems to agree on what is specifically better.