I think the overhead here is not devops itself. Docker and the tools like ansible that have evolved until now are really much more useful than the scripts, etc

I think the overhead here is not devops itself. Docker and the tools like ansible that have evolved until now are really much more useful than the scripts, etc we had back then. The overhead is paying thousands for AWS/Azure/whatever cloud services for your little internal company server or small SaaS when you could just get some on prem servers and host it yourself. A lot of people have been sold on proprietary, fancy stuff like ec2 and lambdas that lock you in just to suck more money out of you. Of course, failure redundancy should be also worked into this, but even hosting in 2 locations is much cheaper than feeding the hungry cloud beast.