> when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ?

I don't think people have forgotten, but I think Amazon has done an amazingly excellent job of marketing and developer relations over the years, to the point that they've convinced most developers that doing your own thing is 1) a lot of expensive, specialized work, and 2) actively dangerous for your business, whether it's because of security, uptime, or some other ops bogeyman of the day.

Note that I said "developers". Most developers are not sysadmins or IT operations people. Most of them have never set up Linux on a desktop or laptop, let alone on real server hardware (that they've also set up themselves). Most of them never had the chance to forget how to run a bare-metal server; they never knew how in the first place. (Hell, I've been running desktop Linux for 25+ years, and I don't think I've ever set up Linux on actual server hardware. Closest I've come is bare-metal Solaris, but that was like 25 years ago.)

"DevOps" today usually means that you know how to run a CLI tool or drive a web interface to deploy your automatically-built container artifact to some cloud-based production system that someone else manages, hiding the details from you. (This bit also can be true for shops that run on bare metal, depending on how advanced their own sysadmin/ops team is.) While developers are often not decision-makers in a larger org, they can be at smaller orgs, and once those developers get on the cloud, you probably will stay on the cloud (companies like OneUptime are the exception, not the rule), even if you've gotten much larger and it's stupid expensive to continue running that way.