I think my ideal devops situation is the one where you start with a simple deployment script from your local machine when it's a one man show and then scale it to a large organization not by switching to a large piece of devops software, but by gradually adding pieces that you need as your team grows and requirements change. Exactly what happened to us and I think our devops workflow is really great and I'm very proud of it.
Some companies have tons of old and new projects with very heterogeneous technologies in use. Imagine 50+ teams, several different programming languages, and things being deployed to different "hardware" (bare metal, cloud VMs, kubernetes, etc). It just seems like a lot of work to manage CI configs for all those different teams/cases, handle "support" requests from different teams, fix issues, and so forth. Hence, why the "easy way" out is to have each team manage CI configuration themselves as much as possible, to spread the maintenance cost across many capable developers.
Technically, version control lends itself naturally as part of the now well-accepted infrastructure-as-code mantra.
Operationally, version control is the one that developers interfacing most primarily, shifting the interactions to that interface would be benefitical to users.
Of course, DevOps as a skill set is becoming less and less relevant, given the increasingly integrated toolings that interfacing directly with developers, that's for sure.