> no matter what anyone says, DevOps was objectively born of replacing the operations discipline and career track with a poorly-understood tool economy and ongoing opex to a cloud provider.

This is abjectly untrue with regards to the origins of the term - though it is the current state of the world, and your assertion about job reqs for "DevOps Engineers" is spot on.

"DevOps" as a term was coined by Patrick Debois and Kris Buytaert to succinctly refer to the concept of operations teams and development teams collaborating in a more appropriate manner than the "throw stuff over a wall" which is still common in many enterprises. It was unrelated to tooling.

We must not let vendors co-opt terms in such a way as this.