i interpreted the “trend” correctly, “devops” was bastardized away from its original meaning to now mean “sysadmin”, at least in most cases.

I don’t think I agree. The role of a sysadmin involved a lot of hand-holding and wrangling low-level details required to keep servers running. DevOps are something completely different. They handle specific infrastructure such as pipelines and deployment scripts, and are in the business of not getting in the way of developers.