"agile and devops both conspire to treat developers as replaceable standins "
There is a lot of irony in that since the first plank of the agile manifesto is to put individuals in interactions first.
And I noticed you put the development process/structure first over the people who want to treat people as fungible.
Well, to be fair, there's what I call "pure" Agile (as in the Manifesto), and then "real-world Agile" (what has the name, but doesn't really seem to follow the Manifesto).
I always liked the Manifesto, but it's really rather vague, and we engineers don't do "vague" so well, which leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
And authors.
And consultants.
And conference speakers.
Those are the ones that form what is eventually implemented. I'm not really sure any of the original signatories ever rolled up their sleeves, and worked to realize their vision.
It's my experience, that this is where the wheels start to come off the grand ideas.
That's one thing that I have to hand to Grady Booch. He came up with the idea, wrote it down, and then started to actually make tools to make it happen. Not sure if they really launched, but he did work to make his ideas into reality.