It's one of those kinds of statements that at first glance, looks really insightful and invites the head nodding up & down in agreement.
However, thinking about it some more, that type of quote can be applied to anything.
"Compliance is a culture not a role. Everyone from the CEO to the janitor should be aware of legal compliance. Having a compliance department is wrong."
"Security is a culture not a role. Every employee should create quality passwords and follow proper encryption procedures, ..."
"Marketing is a culture not a role...", "Design is a culture not a role...", "" etc, etc. Every employee should know/do everything. If you have a separate marketing team and design team, your company has failed.
Yes, I can see where one ideal of devops is to "break down silos" and therefore, having a set of programmers who specialize in that is "recreating the silo" which is a contradiction. On the other hand, I can see the opposite view: if a company wholeheartedly embraces "devops", they will acknowledge that by having a team that focuses on devops. If you're a Google paying a programmer like Jeff Dean $500k+ a year, you really don't want him working on Chef/Puppet scripts instead of Tensorflow research. At a more advanced level of skills above Ansible/Docker automation is the SRE (Site Reliabity Engineers) which has a lot of overlap[1] with Devops focused engineers.
A specialization in devops seems inevitable especially for larger companies that exceed 10 people. In short, I'm not sure why "devops" in particular has to rigidly adhere to Heinlein's "specialization is for insects".[2]
As for other comments saying it's "title inflation", I'm confused as to the source of that sentiment. The "devops engineer" doesn't seem like a glamorous tile similar to "I'm CEO, bitch"[3]. There are no "50 Shades of Grey" movies where the female lead gets weak at the knees at the mere mention of "devops programmer". The "sanitation engineer" euphemism of "garbageman" I understand as inflation but "devops engineer" seems like a sideways or neutral label. I'm mystified by the outrage over this programming label.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_reliability_engineering#D...