Sure, but that's exactly my point.
One devop who is much more capable in programming, leverages his superior skills to automate away 20-50 sysadmins.
That one devop still has a job. In fact, he is probably promoted and makes more money than any of the single sysadmin he replaces, since he his set of skills and abilities is more rare. But that doesn't change the fact that 29-49 lower-skilled tech workers are now out of a job.
All these people went into sysadmin training because someone naively projected very high demand for their relatively limited skillset. Then they got automated away.
The same process is happening relentlessly. Ever more so as the cost of living in places like the Bay skyrockets. Companies employ fewer people, pay each of them more, but expect a very large amount of output from each.
So telling people "hey, you don't have to be smart, or learn much, to have a great career in tech" is simply misleading. Take a guess at the number of sysadmins who followed this advice, and have out of a job since the advent of the cloud.
Also, plenty of system administrators still make a good living out there. Just as their are still companies running 40 year old code. Automation is less about replacing every system administrator as it is allowing companies to have fewer of them. Which eventually means it’s not a full time job and it’s folded into other tasks.
Generally the costs of automation outweigh the benifits at some point and people sit in the middle. Look at a coke bottling plant and their is one manual step where a guy loads the can lids into the machine. It’s just one guy and he gets something like 1,700 cans a minute so it’s just not a big deal.
PS: See 5:00 to 6:00 on this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nHQXxhd4CHE#fauxfullscreen