Considering the rapid shift from on Prem to the cloud I think it’s clearly false that the people who knew on Prem were fighting for their little area of expertise.

In my experience, the ops folks were absolutely thrilled with the arrival of the cloud because with a trivial amount of training and a couple of certifications they had a pathway to get paid as much, if not more, than devs, especially if they rebranded as “devops engineers” instead of “ops guys”.

The only pushback against the cloud, other than some of us engineers who actually were among the first to jump on the cloud, still really loved it, but also recognized that it wasn’t the best fit for all uses and carried significant risks, were people worried about data safety.

The latter concern has largely turned out to not be a real one yet, but a decade and a half later people are finally realizing that actually there are many areas where the cloud may not be the best fit.