> When it is handed over the SREs get all the keys to the kingdom and have the rights, responsibility and ability to fix bugs in the software they're running.

Bug fixing is still the responsibility of the developers, which isn't to say that SRE won't help out at times but it's not their role.

> If you have legacy codebases run entirely by ops people who don't have any ability to maintain the codebases then you aren't doing SRE.

An SRE is not a maintenance engineer. Service ownership is always a partnership between SRE and developers. If there's no developers, then there's no SREs.