Don't agree. My current client is rather small, but I just had a meeting which would have been concluded with "we'll have to set up 15 vm's before you can start

Don't agree. My current client is rather small, but I just had a meeting which would have been concluded with "we'll have to set up 15 vm's before you can start developing and have 5 alignment meetings before they're correctly set up", versus "I just created a namespace for you guys to do whatever you want in, and mailed you the link to the docs for the CI/CD and deploy guidelines". They run a self-hosted OpenShift cluster, which is managed internally by a team of 4. Not only makes this situation it a lot easier to spin up new environments, it also forces devs to include the ops team from the start for stuff they don't know, and corrections can be made early on.