You've touched on some very key problems here. It's seems like at some point around five years ago the three tier architecture with it's division of labor vani

You've touched on some very key problems here. It's seems like at some point around five years ago the three tier architecture with it's division of labor vanished over night. I'm not saying things were perfect back then but I've never seen any demonstrably objective reasons why it was replaced. I went from having to be mindful a few configuration items which arose from deploying my war to different environments to slogging through configuration hell in the Terraform and AWS world. I've been learning way more about Ops than I ever cared to know while at the same time becoming a -10x developer in terms of shipping business value.