Hum... My first guess is that what really changed was the ratio of developers working on places that do this to the ones working on places that integrate the jobs.
The wall was never the only model around. It still isn't. The same kind of company that practiced it still largely have walls. The IT industry just hired a lot of people.
Well sure, and that's because software companies that integrate the jobs is now so much more widespread and commonplace, thanks to "devops". Kind of my point.
15 years ago it was often still I without the C, integration that wasn't continuous. Code freeze 1 month before release, put all the bits of code together, everything breaks, try to fix it.
Many struggle with "if you build it, you operate it" because many developers don't want to be on pager duty.
The "DevOps" job title can arguably just be a sysadmin, but I do think the main ideals of the movement are just so tightly ingrained in software now that we don't even notice.
It's easy to forget that 10-15 years ago, the most common dev/ops model was "toss it over the fence"--developers write code, do a ton of QA work on the test system, and then toss it to ops, who had no idea what metrics to look for beyond standard cpu/mem/etc. Your dev team would write up a "runbook" for operators to follow if anything broke, which was usually just restarting things until they got into a good state again. The big tech players of the 00s like AWS and Google were probably more advanced of this, but the rest of the world largely wasn't.
Now, the most common model for companies of all sizes is "if you build it, you operate it". Devs are expected to know what metrics to expose, have oncall rotations, and have direct access to their production systems. Cloud, CI/CD and git helped quite a lot in this regard, reducing time between deployments from months to weeks to days to hours and minutes.
This continues to be the lasting legacy of "DevOps" IMO, it shouldn't be understated how much of an impact it had on our industry.