If your org treats dev as more valuable than SRE you likely aren’t doing SRE correctly. It should be a fairly high status role. Your org likely just has an old

If your org treats dev as more valuable than SRE you likely aren’t doing SRE correctly. It should be a fairly high status role. Your org likely just has an old fashioned ops team that has rebranded. In any case you definitely don’t want to move from a high status position to a low status one in your organization. Switch orgs to one that treats what you want to do as high status. For what it’s worth, I agree that your manager is wrong but there are lots of ways to skin a cat and a dev/op split is a very traditional route that lots of teams are successful at.