It's been a very strange 10 years to see the title of "sysadmin" start to become "IT button pusher" and the actual skilled role turn to the title of devops.
As far as the move for the word "sysadmin"--no joke, I blame it on Windows and small- to medium-scale businesses. When for a long time the conception of a "system administrator" is "mouse-driven process-follower", a competent software developer who happens to develop systems that throw EC2 instances around just isn't going to want to be associated with that title.
Back in the day these were called Systems Programmers but they’re a rare breed these days.
In my career I've seen maybe four people who can be called system programmers. It's a pity, because there's still so much to build, and it takes a system programmer to spot what ops tools to build, why, and to actually build them.
That's somewhat ironic, since doing development and building software tools in such areas (and system software in general) can be very interesting work: including not just the programming, but also the conceptualization, the product requirement definition, the design, seeing it in deployment and iterating to make changes, add new wanted features, etc.
That has not been my main area of work, but I have some background in it, and have done some pieces here and there (small products or parts of others) and find it to be really enjoyable work. In fact, for many developers, it can be more fun than doing business domain-level development (LOB apps), or social media / consumer apps kind of stuff. I've done some work in all those 3 broad areas, hence the comment.
impossible is a stretch. harder than it appears perhaps.
If one looks at the original unix devs, this was often the case - modify the kernel to add a new system call so that your runtime system can do X to enable your application to do Y. A true 'sysadmin' in those days was not a pure-IT person, he was an expert of the systems. It is only with the rise of binary-only systems (e.g. SunOS) and IT commercialization that a 'sysadmin' crystallized into a separate pure-IT task distinct from 'developer'.
In my view, what is called 'DevOps' for the operationally focused, and 'FullStack' for the software focused, is really just a return to this mode of operation, which is what a true 'sysadmin' or 'hacker' already was since the dawn of time.