If ops is handling ops and you're using automated CI/CD, then all you need to do as a software developer is "git push," and it doesn't matter whether it's containers, VMs, or bare metal running the code, nor does it matter what's orchestrating the containers, VMs, or raw servers.

I've also done everything from bare servers to VMs to containers, in varying capacities. For small teams with fewer than millions of users, the fewer moving parts the better. One monolithic app scaled mostly vertically, one database scaled mostly vertically, and maybe one caching layer scaled horizontally, will be far more productive for development.