They're being perverted into a role having a full load of pure operations with shit for processes (and, often, systems) and an expectation that you have time to automate and shore up all the shit and technical debt accumulated since.
Can most good or even extraordinary developers simultaneously be elbow deep on a dozen unrelated products and actually get reasonable traction? I can barely keep one glass castle together, myself.
Never having the time to properly finish a project that I was proud of delivering, turning those into services so we could leverage self-servicing was a dream that most of the time never happened, we were left with half-done systems requiring tons of manual intervention (lots of toil) while having to move fast to the next thing...
Whats a “devops person” for you and what keeps them busy? And why cant they have systems that hum along self-healingly automated?
So, not only is there the responsibility of creating this self-healing automated infrastructure, but keeping tools and resume up-to-date, as well.
"Use what works" definitely presents a lot more choices these days and likely will forever more.
"Use what works well" is something different where "well" implies helpful, dependable, predictable, manageable and so on that will continue to scale with your needs. Only breaking things down the "old-school" way will lead towards success, stability, security and life outside the box.
Good devops is still, primarily, good engineers engineering good things, for themselves and others.
Granted the article is from 2015 but my impression is author is not just cranky, but scared.