But if you don't have a dedicated ops team, some people get pigeon-holed for the role in the team. Not necessarily the best thing for them, because now they face pressures from both sides.

I'd recommend the lead takes the role.

This is a simple organizational problem with a simple solution: don’t do that. Instead, ensure everyone on the team has a production pager, and that the person responsible for work prioritization gets every single page in order that they feel the pain of that (this may well be the lead, like you say!).

Align incentives to create simple, reliable software.

> and that the person responsible for work prioritization gets every single page in order that they feel the pain of that.

This sounds like an incredibly toxic work environment

Having one single person get all the pages does sound like it's going a bit far. The point though is for there to be a tight feedback loop between problems in the infrastructure and the ability to solve them. If this isn't the case, someone else in the organization is feeling that pain, but often they aren't empowered to solve them.

It’s substantially less toxic than the people who prioritize work only prioritizing feature delivery, and not operability.

> Align incentives to create simple, reliable software.

This is the way.

I think if everyone around you is changing the definition of a word, then it is fair to say it doesn't have any meaning anymore. Either if everyone around you is using it in same way, then you adapt. Or if everyone has different meanings, then it is meaningless.

Indeed, there are many examples of this (“woke” and “DevOps” are two I’ve encountered just this morning), and we should push back on all of them rather than accepting a continuously escalating stairmaster of bullshit.