This is exactly my sentiment and why I moved away from SRE and back to SWE. I felt busy all the time doing development of tools and infrastructure while at the same time aggregating the role of operations.

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...