I might be able to shed some light on one possible way this ends up happening because I was on a team that did exactly this. The team/manager probably doesn't

I might be able to shed some light on one possible way this ends up happening because I was on a team that did exactly this. The team/manager probably doesn't know what they want or does and has the budget for only a single hire. Their expectations are completely disconnected from industry/reality because they just don't know any better and probably lucked out getting into their position. They want a strong developer because the team needs one (or several), but they desperately need ops to keep their project afloat. So, sure, OP has all the right ops keywords on their resume, but can they also be that developer we really need?! I butted heads constantly with my manager who had that mentality because of things like that. We rejected great DevOps candidates because we wanted them to be developers and good developers because we wanted them to know ops.