My take (I'm an SRE) is that SRE should work pre-emptively to provide reproducible prod-like environments so that QA can test DEV code closer to real-life conditions. Most prod platforms I've seen are nowhere near that level of automation, which makes it really hard to detect or even reproduce production issues.

And no, as an SRE I won't read DEV code, but I can help my team test it.

Why not? I'm a SWE SRE and I'm arguably better at telling good code from bad code than many of the pure devs I've worked with.