DevOps only works when the developers are always right. What usually happens is the DevOps team thinks they know best (they are developers too, just not the ones using the tools), and they build a lot of garbage that no one wants to use, often making things more complicated than they were before.
Eventually a bureaucrat becomes the manager of the team, and seeks to expand the set of things under DevOps' control. This makes the team a single point of failure for more and more things, while driving more and more developer processes towards mediocrity. Velocity slows, while the DevOps bottlenecks are used as a reason to hire.
It's an organizational problem, not a talent or knowledge problem. Allowing a group to hire and grow within an organization, which is not directly accountable for the success of the other parts of the organization that it was intended to support, is creating a cancer, definitionally.
Don't attribute internal dysfunction and mistakes to an entire field. I've worked in an org where the opposite is true. Blanket statements like these never hold up because they lack nuance and usually are inspired by frustration
If an idea or methodology leads to "internal dysfunction" more often than not, than maybe it's a problem with the idea, and not a "lack of nuance".
which idea is it that leads to the internal dysfunction? The one where someone has already made their mind up about what does and doesn't work for everyone everywhere?