alt Hacker NewsDevOps was a reasonable idea, but it rarely actually manifested. If a company had an actual "DevOps group" separate from the developers, by definition they weren't doing DevOps.
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I am consistently surprised that I'm unique for enjoying, and if I may be so bold, being pretty good at, both Ops and appdev. Now I'm not the greatest in the world, but I really do firmly believe now that most generalists should strive to be able to do both at a journeyman level.
To my understanding, this _is_ DevOps in the original sense of the word, and the version where they are a separate team is an offshoot bastardization.
At my last job, it was somewhere in-between where we had DevOps specialists who were regular software engineers who allocated the bulk of their time to building / running infra via Real Code (Pulumi vs. TF, minimal YAML wrangling etc) and built paths for app devs to self-service as much as they could. That, I felt, was a really excellent setup.
Yes, big companies have a tendency to over-structure things. Devops? Sounds great, let's have a dedicated team for it. Agile? Absolutely, and to make sure it's done right, we need a rigid process around it.
Devops definitely still exists, I've seen it. It is when people are responsible, even in the middle of the night, for the systems they fucked up engineering in the day.
Real DevOps is actually just Dev - in that the Devs are doing the Ops. The people called DevOps are just there to backstop the devs oncall when shit hits fan and you need someone more experienced in ops / incident management to escalate to.
Part of the problem, and what ultimately drove me out of coding altogether, is that Ops is a specialized skillset completely orthoganal to the business of building applications. And, I was really bad at it due to a complete lack of interest. As cloud environments get more and more complicated one ends up spending more and more time dealing with that at the expense of building things.
Conversely, there are lots of folks who love ops type problems and are not well suited to building apps. So, it makes sense to put them on separate teams where they can each do the thing that they're best at, rather than fumble through the parts of the jobs they hate. But yes, at this point it's not really DevOps anymore, it's just ops.