this feels incredibly familiar. either youre promoted to a lead, given no training, and fired or demoted when you dont succeed, or you're slowly just "recognized" as the lead without any overt assertion from management. The latter is the worst, because after a few month or even a year there is a tacit communal agreement among leadership that you're secretly the lead without ever defining what that is. pretty soon you're charged with everything from random powerpoint presentations to some midlevel managers incident/action reports with no real idea why its happening other than you're a 'subject matter expert.'
It has a scarring effect ive found, anecdotally. Ive spent 12 years as a systems administrator in various contexts (traditional, devops, contract, etc..) and I've already declined a leadership role on the pretext that its just going to be system administration with the expectation with added clerical ditch-digging for the real management team.