Healers don't go around asking who needs healing, they see low health and prioritize. That is not asking "what should I do?", that is being proactive about the needs of the team.

Two points to that:

* Looking for people who caught aggro and getting out ahead of it is the bulk of my work. It's how I prioritize my workstream. The problem, and where the metaphor breaks down, is that I'm not omnipotent or have Grid2. If my devs don't tell me their pain points or I don't pull it out of them by asking what deliverables they would like to see out of me I would miss out lots of higher priority items than what I can see.

* The whole reason I'm on a team is because I have a specialized skillset and am but one stakeholder among many who want things from me. I will never run out of stuff to bring to planning but ultimately it's a group discussion about what I should do next. For larger companies s/me/the infra team.

This framing is extremely stupid and misses the point entirely.

That's pretty uncharitable of you. I am an infra person myself and while I appreciate the parent's point about making themselves available to pick up other things on a dime, I was trying to point out that you can also proactively identify needs and address them as an infra person, often in ways that can be applied to other teams and that this is very much not asking for what they should be doing.

Independently of the framing being stupid, that anyone thinks this is about an infra person being available to unblock a dev team or not is a perfect example of the confusion that can happen when "what should I do?" people get "what are we doing?" context.