Too late. The industry has chosen to deviate the word.
For years as a sysadmin I was arguing people that devops is a methodology and not a function. Now I have the Sr Devops Engineer title. I know I am still just a sys and platform engineer who's job is to facilitate life of developers but hey the industry insist on calling me devops, I have other fights more important than fixing my title and team name.
I just tend to think that 20y ago people were relaying memes about sysadmins being motherfuckers who just randomly denied everything to clueless developers while the devops term emphases more the collaboration side. I hope the devs I work with are happy working with me, I sure have a good relationship with them. If that is being what the industry now choose to call a devops, I am a devops.
Realistically though, I'm 100% sure that absolutely nothing will stand in the way of the DevOps job title being denigrated.
Companies have for a very long time used title inflation to bait and switch the unwary software engineer into editing enterprise software configs, and will continue to do so for all of time..
I use to say that it’s like one of the business domain development teams, it’s just that the domain is “dev”. The businesses devs are the stakeholders, and the tooling/platform team members are usually already domain experts that write code.
Having a “devops” team would feel like having a team called “agile team” or something - you do “devops”, you can’t build it.