I mean, you're not wrong in that there's definitely a massive difference between the power of tools that a devops engineer can use today vs what a sys admin had

I mean, you're not wrong in that there's definitely a massive difference between the power of tools that a devops engineer can use today vs what a sys admin had access to back in the day before the devops movement was established (and that was a clear break point that was announced all over the likes of HN and there was a manifesto and all that). But nowadays if you want to manage your own metal then you can use those tools as well. You can still run hypervisors VMs on your own servers. You're just not paying Amazon 6x the price of what it would cost you, and you're not relegated to low-performing compute, memory, and IO elements that Amazon standardized on.