PCGW is a great example - installing a new Mediawiki extension, changing a config file, upgrading to a newer MW release is just updating a file or a git submodule and committing. I don’t get paid thousands a month to manage the site for the owner, so I make my time spent as efficient as can be done.
Hardly. If anything at all, it tells about the _team_ and/or the culture of the organisation. In any DevOps/SRE/Opsec culture worth the salt, an immediate blameless postmortem analysis would be performed to help with premortem analysis in future.
DevOps is not about exposing unsecured endpoints. You've got it all wrong son.
Fair enough. I am letting you know though the part where you got mixed up - that is not because _What DevOps has become in practice_. That is precisely because of failings and shortcomings in team culture and/or the organisation that practice DevOps.
I migrated PCGamingWiki from running on some Hetzner boxes to DigitalOcean Kubernetes in a few days of work creating Dockerfiles and k8s manifests. I run a Kubernetes cluster at work fairly hands-free that hosts applications critical to our billing operations, and developers on the team deploy new applications with little or no support. Any of the issues I've hit are an artifact of migrating legacy applications not designed to run in more-or-less stateless environments, which is why the PCGW Community site still runs on its own server (Invision Community sucks).
I really don't see all the issues people have that aren't due to a mismatch of application design vs target environment (and no, it's not monolith vs microservice - monoliths run just fine on k8s; but you should be designing your application with a 12-factor environment in mind) or a misguided notion that you will be drowning in YAML hell (it's real, but you can manage it - and it's directly related to the complexity of the services you are deploying).