I usually come in after the fact to clean up whatever horrible thing the consulting firm did. I don’t want to malign them publicly but it’s the same one every single time.

I think they might not “need” it as much as they think they do, but they want faster deployments, better automation, less downtime. Usually the devops team is the one that handles this for most organizations. ramming code into prod by scp’ing some files into a single monolithic host can get you a long way, but at a certain point, it doesn’t, IMHO.