IDK. More and more I see the argument of “I don’t know, and we are not experts in xxx” as a winning argument of why we should just spend money on 3rd party services and products.
I have seen people getting paid 700k plus a year spend their entire stay at companies writing papers about how they can’t do something and the obvious solution is to spend 400k plus to have some 3rd party handle it, and getting the budget.
Let’s not get into what the conversation looks like when somebody points out that we might have an issue if we are paying somebody 700k to hire somebody else temporarily for 400k each year, and that we should find these folks who can do it for 400k and just hire Them.
All this to say that being a SWE in many companies today requires no ability to create software that solves business problems. But rather some sort of quasi system administrator manager who will maybe write a handful of DSL scripts over the course of their career.
Of course, many infra activities take less time in the public cloud. E.g. control plane maintenance and upgrades on EKS are managed by AWS and are mostly painless so you never worry about stuff like etcd. On the other hand, there is a ton of stuff you need to know anyway to operate AWS in a proficient and safe way so I'm not convinced the difference is that huge today.
You are not the only one. There are several factors at play but I believe one of the strongest today is the generational divide: the people lost the ability to manage their own infra or don't know it well enough to do it well so it's true when they say "It's too much hassle". I say this as an AWS guy who occasionally works on on-prem infra.[0]
[0] As a side note, I don't believe the lack of skills is the main reason organizations have problem - skills can be learned, but if you mess up the initial architecture design, fixing that can easily take years.